The Self-Produchon of Society >\m?/- il :l) W DEREK COLWlkN
The Jnversity of Chicago Press go and _or Mcoao _onccn
A...
126 downloads
2258 Views
45MB Size
Report
This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form
The Self-Produchon of Society >\m?/- il :l) W DEREK COLWlkN
The Jnversity of Chicago Press go and _or Mcoao _onccn
Alain Touraine is professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He is co-founder of the journal Sociologie du travail and past president of the French Sociological Society. Among his previously published works are Sociologie de I 'action (1965), La conscience ouvriere (1966), May Movement (1968, English translation 1971), Post-industrial Society (1969, English translation 1971), The Academic System in American Society (1972, English translation 1974), Pour la sociologie and Lettres a une etudiante (both 1974). The present work was First published as Production de la socidte; © Editions du Seuil, 1973.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1977 by the University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1977 Printed in the United States of America 81 80 79 78 77 987654321 Library of Congrefs Cataloging In Publication Data Touraine, Alain. The self-production of society. Translation of Production de la societe Includes index. 1. Sociology. 1. Title. HM51.T6713 301 76-611 ISBN 0-226-80858-0
CONlHSirS
Foreword by J. W. Freiberg Preface Introduction
XI
1
Historicity
15
A. Society Turns Back upon Itself B. Historical Action C. The Cardinal Points of Sociology D. The Birth of Sociology E. From Orientations to Practice F. Actors and Systems
15 27 32 48 53 60
2
The System of Historical Action
65
A. B.
65
The Dominion of Historicity Locating the System of Historical Action C. The Functioning of the System of Historical Action D. The Configurations of the System of Historical Action
xvii 1
72 79 91
VII
Contents
3 4 5
Class Relations
117
A. Historicity and Social Classes B. Classes as Historical Actors C. Types of Class Systems: Industrial Society D. Postindustrial Society E. Alienation F. Concluding Remarks
118 134
The Political or Institutional System
175
A. Institutions B. Institutionalization C. Between Historicity and Organization D. The State
175 197 206 216
Social Organization
235
Introduction: Where Sociology and History Meet A. The Organizational System B. Administrations, Enterprises, Agencies C. The Categories of Social Practice
235 239 249 270
149 155 166 170
Contents
6
7
Social Movements
298
A. Four Kinds of Collective Conduct B. The Nature of Social Movements C. The Natural History of Social Movements D. Level s of Project E. Formation of Social Movements F. Social Movements and the State E. Concluding Remarks
298 310
Social Change
374
Introduction: Historicity, Conflict, Change A. The Temporality of Social Systems B. Rupture Conduct C. Conduct of Internal Transformation D. Forms of Development E. Concluding Remarks
374 383 389 411 424 443
Conclusion
446
A. B.
446 449
The Sociologist and His Society Analysis and Action
336 343 355 364 371
Contents
C. Decline or Binh of Sociology D. The Internationalization of Sociology E. The Author Quits His Book
453 454 456
Glossary Index
459 465
FOREH/ORD
When I was a graduate student at UCLA in 1969, Alain Touraine came to teach tor a semester. He had just come from Santiago de Chile, where he had taught for the previous semester. Although 1 did not know it at the time, Touraine was in a self-imposed exile—a sort of modern Hegira. The events of May 1968 had been difficult for him; he had been one of very few major professors to become deeply involved. When the events came to a summary end, he found himself in limbo. He had been too involved for most of his colleagues and friends of his generation, and not involved enough for most of his students and friends of my generation. He needed to distance himself from Paris, from the barricades and recriminations, and to take the time to think about what it all meant and what were the implications for the grand theoretical model he had envisioned creating of the 'events'—the student activism, the old-left conservatism, the Gaullist repression. In Los Angeles Touraine gave a graduate seminar on the subject matter of what has become, in this book, the chapters on historicity and the system of action. The class began with about twenty graduate students and three or four professors in attendance. Two weeks later about eight students remained, including one from Argentina, one from Chile, and one from Alabama. Those who fled found the class i4too theoretical," "too abstract/' "too philosophical." Indeed the material presented was radically different from most American sociology. Yet I remember so well the feelings of the smaller group who stuck with it; each one of us felt after the semester that wre had had the most powerful intellectual experience of our graduate career. For the first time we were able to put in sociopolitical perspective the individualistic, psychologistic, scientistic bits and pieces that had been presented to us in our more usual courses and texts. We had read some
xii
Foreword
predigested Marx, of course, in our survey theory course, but the paradigm in which we thought and were taught—and thus in which we read Marx— was hopelessly reified. We memorized bits of theory and bits of methods, a touch of demography, a hint of history, all with a pinch of salt. We were not being educated. We were being minestrone'd. That is why Touraine's seminar was such a salient experience for us. For the first time we met a sociologist who operated from a unified, theoretically sophisticated perspective that added together for him what to us seemed like the nearly infinite and essentially unrelated events of the world. We had been wanting, I would even say hungering, for a theoretical model that would add together for us all that we experienced so poignantly—Vietnam, the student movement, the Black rights movement, the new values on patterns of interpersonal relations, the repressiveness of the military, espionage and police machinery of the United States, and so on. We learned much from Touraine, but he learned from us, also. He was fascinated by the spontaneity of our newly found, nondoctrinal critique of modern society, and by the counterculture we were creating to permit us to live more humanistic, more cooperative lives personally, while we acted as we could to support the liberalizing movements of our day. In 1970-71 I had the opportunity to live in Paris and to study again with Touraine. 1 was to learn that the difference between him and most of my professors in California was simply a manifestation of the differences between European and American thinking in general. I was shocked, frankly. In place of the professional, highly "specialized" American sociologists, the Europeans were intellectuals, far more likely to be concerned with broad issues, and to be able to situate the issues of their research both philosophically and historically. Instead of viewing the social world as a haphazard collection of independent events, the Europeans searched for the unity hidden beneath the surface of everyday phenomena. 1 had been brought up to equate totalitarianism with thought control; it had never occurred to me that in a liberal, reasonably pluralistic society, the general thought patterns of an entire people could be so effectively structured. 1 sat in on Touraine's seminar at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Of the twenty-five students, few were French; they came from three or four Latin American, two or three African, three or four European and two Asian countries (1 was the only American). We all spoke French, but what a wild cacophony of accents! Ever)' other week, we heard from Touraine the early versions of what are here the chapters of the political-institutional system, class relations, and social movements. On the odd weeks, we tried with each other to apply his theoretical models to the varied experiences of our different backgrounds. We sat around an enormous old table trying to come up with
Foreword
x, j
'
an understanding of the world we were inheriting and the generation of our parents who were running it so inadequately. One thing became particularly clear. There was a total rejection of the positivist, functionalist modete of American sociological theory that were based on the assumption that society was a grouping of capable adults making rational decisions, and that, but for a few deviants, things were pretty good and getting better all the time. The consensus was that only an analysis of society in terms of class relations could possibly explain the origin and dynamics of poverty and exploitation, of rebellion and repression. We saw the only possible sociology to be one which saw society not as a given state of affairs which was to be protected and preserved, but as the result of social action—including discussion and decision, but also conflict and struggle. Touraine's social theory was respected by that multinational seminar, though we critiqued it endlessly. He listened—and defended it—but also changed it and incorporated much of the critique. Again the seminar was an exciting experience, in part because the theoretical material presented provided a model within which we could gain insight and communicate with each other about the events of the world which swirled around us. But in part, as in the Los Angeles seminar, what made the experience lively was to watch Touraine incorporating our critique and the perspective of our generation into his theoretical work. Out of these seminars, and others like them, came the present book. At the same time this book incorporates the critique and advice of so many students and colleagues, many of its ideas can be seen in embryonic form in Touraine's thesis^ Sociologie de I action. Although the present work is highly abstract and theoretical, its models are immediately applicable and enormously useful in specific empirical studies. While the general thrust of the book is clear to anyone with a basic knowledge of the traditional literature of sociological theory, much of the discussion is original and ground-breaking. Several years ago Touraine andJDaniel Belj almost simultaneously published books on what they called "postindustrial society." It is certainly critical to examine how different are the paradigms within which the sociologists work, for the somewhat similar notions of postindustrial society take on radically different meanings for them. Both are arguing that, especially since World War II, there have been significant changes in the social processes of production and reproduction in industrial society. Somehow we must account for the increasingly important roles of science, the public sector, mass education, etc. Bell's perspective leads him to interpret these changes essentially in an "end of ideology" direction, whereas Touraine's model suggests, in brief, that we are indeed moving into a new
xiv
Foreword
phase of social relations, and that we therefore should be prepared to examine and understand the new social classes, conflicts, and ideologies that will be developing. Bell's postindustrial concept is a polemic against dialectical thought, while Touraine's concept is a call to sharpen our dialectical wits in order to comprehend new actors—new social classes—in a new situation. The chapter on the political-institutional system presents a model for political sociology that to my mind dialecticafly overcomes the current debate between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas as to what degree of unity one ought to suppose exists between the ruling class and the state. The model provides for a simultaneous appreciation of the relative autonomy of a political system within the structured confines of a class society. That is, we are asked to see the real, operating dialectic between a ruling class's prepolitical determination of the boundaries of possible politics on one hand, and the partly autonomous political action of opposed interest groups (some of which directly represent the ruling class perspective) within these boundaries, on the other. So the model clarifies the double entry of the ruling class into politics; it both formulates a prepolitical structuration of possible political action, and at the same time acts within the political arena through interest groups and politicians who propose and support specific legislation and administrative action which furthers ruling class interests. Another function of Touraine's political sociology in respect to his scheme taken as a whole is the transitional role the political-institutional level plays in mediating between historicity at one extreme, and the organizational phenomena of everyday life at the other. The historicity of a society is seen as an abstract, ultimately general determination of what the phenomenal experiences of an empirical society will actually be like. To be an industrial society as opposed to a preindustrial or postindustrial society is, after all. determinant of many things; there are widely differing possibilities in institutional processes and organizational structures for three such differing historicities. Yet everyday life can be radically different in two industrial societies; the relative autonomy of both the institutional and organizational levels within a given society provide for a relatively wide range of possible political and organizational patterns. The political-institutional level, then, is seen as the active transformational agent between the vague definitions of the situation provided by the historicity (mode of accumulation, definition of the cultural model, model of knowledge, pattern of class relations), and the hyperspecificity of the regies du jeu of everyday life. That is what is so fascinating about Touraine's political sociology. It is at once an abstract theoretical model, and an effort to be specific about the transformational role of politics in structuring social reality in respect to patterns of production and power structuring the historicity of a
Foreword
given society. It is a model of political sociology to be directly opposed to those political analysts who argue for the total autonomy and final causality of political process (mainstream American political science is the guiltiest of this). But, on the other hand, it is equally opposed to those analysts who find the state to be nothing more than a complex ideologically sophisticated mechanism of ruling class hegemony. Touraine refuses to see society as a large and essentially happy family, as in the former image, where pluralistic decision making determines the definitions and direction of social reality. But he equally refuses to see society as a large organization, managed by the reigning ruling class along the lines of an upper-class Victorian household, as in the latter image. Touraine asks us to appreciate the complex interrelations between the production system and class relations, between class relations and the relative autonomy of the political-institutional system, between the ruling class as prepolitical determiner of the political system and the ruling class as a political actor, between the popular class as agent of rebellion and social changeand the popular class as willing participant in everyday life and thus the active agent of stability and passivity. One of the most convincing pieces of evidence in support of the usefulness of this model of the transformational role of politics between the extreme generalities of historicity at one end of the scale and the extreme specifics of organized everyday life at the other, is the omnipresence of politics (in his sense of the word "politics") even in antipolitical societies. Clearly, on one level, totalitarian societies are sometimes without relatively autonomous political arenas. Yet Touraine predicts that what happens in such societies, and 1 think recent historical events bear him out on this, is that the ruling class effort to do away with politics succeeds only in displacing it, not eliminating it. Thus, when there is no openness at the political-institutional level, as when it is used as a transparent ideological mechanism providing no forum for dissent, political conflicts are displaced onto the organizational level. Thus organizational structures become deeply politically involved and divided, with factionalism, intrigue and even outright conflict. So if a ruling class attempts to run society as if it were merely an organization and represses political debate and dissent, it ends by displacing such conflict into its organizational structures— into the bureaucracy, the army, the universities, the hospitals, and so on. Such a model as Touraine provides seems extremely useful, for example, in studying the development of the political consciousness of the Portuguese army under the recent fascist regime. Another provocative idea, which is introduced in this book and further developed in more recent writings by others, is an analysis of the state fundamentally as an agent of social change and not as an actor of social structure. Touraine emphasizes more and more the necessity to separate and then to coordinate a structural analysis organized around the concept of
Foreword
historicity and social class and a genetic analysis whose central concept is the state. There is no question that this newest and I think most important book of Alain Touraine makes difficult reading, as does just about all French social-philosophy. Yet there is a remarkable richness of original ideas here; he who carefully explores these pages will not be disappointed. J. W. Freiberg Boston University
PRB54CE
I undertook the writing of this book in the fall of 1966 at the University of Montreal. Having spent the years 1962-64 writing my Sociologie de faction, which was at the same time a study of social actors and an essay on the advanced industrial societies, I now wanted to go more directly to the essence of the matter by analyzing what is commonly termed social structure, and bydevoting all my efforts to defining a theoretical procedure. Those first texts were replaced by others, usually written for my seminars, especially at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, but also at the Facultad latino-americana de sociologia in Santiago, Chile, at the University of California in Los Angeles, and at the Institut d'e*tude du de\eloppment e*conomique et social in Paris. My task was several times interrupted by other labors that seemed more urgent or that required less time. It was stimulated by the May 1968 crisis I lived through at the University de Nanterre and experienced as a social, Utopian movement that soon collapsed but that nevertheless heralded a new society and by its very occurrence demanded fresh thought from sociology. Certain chapters have been published or distributed in versions predating this one and also, as is only too evident, very different from it. However, I think I had better indicate the following publication details: chapter 1, "Historicity," appeared in Vers une nouvelle civilisation? a tribute to Georges Friedmann (Paris, NRF, 1973). Chapter2,4iLe system d'action," appeared in the)ouma\Sociologieetsocie'te's 1, no.2 (1969):221-47. Chapter3, "Les classes sociales," appeared in Las classes sociales en America latina. Transactions of the Merida Conference organized by the Instituto de Estudios Sociologicos of the U.N.A.M., Mexico. Chapter 6, "Les mouvements sociaux," was presented as a paper to the World Congress of Sociology held at Varna, September 1969, and published in part in the Rassegna italiana de sociologia, January-March 1972, pp. 11-60.
xvili
Preface
I feel the greatest gratitude toward all those, whether colleagues or students, who have helped me throughout all these years with their comments and criticisms. Perhaps they have succeeded in rendering communicable thoughts that were at the outset very close to my personal experience, my life at work, and my place in society. In particular I thank Werner and Maria Ackerman, Anouar Abdel-Malek, Michel Amiot, Fausto Ayrton, Guy Bajoit, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Manuel Castells, Maurice Chaumont, Jacques Dofny, Robert Fraisse, J. W. Freiberg, Jean Max Gaudilliere, Louis Maheu, Alberto Melucci, Edgar Morin, Serge Moscovici, Bernard Mottez, Jose* Nun, Francoise Quarr£, Melvin Seeman, Geronimo de Sierra, Silvia Sigal, Dominique Wolton, Francisco Weffort. Christiane Guigues helped me in gathering together the various books and documents I needed—and that I decided notto list at the end, since this book is something of a loner's effortv^£vett*4>ufIohelped me lfl a variety of ways. Colettef Dicfier transcribed manuscripts verging on the undecipherable with a competence and a sunny patience that I hope were not lavished in vain. Section VI of the £cole pratiques des hautes etudes, particularly its Centre d'£tudedes mouvements sociaux, once the Laboratoire de sociologie industrielle, have provided me all these years with a working environment to which I am far too attached to attempt any banal expression of my gratitude. The weight of this book has been born by Adriana, Marisol, and Philippe as much as by me. It belongs to them. It is hard being a sociologist. We are too involved in the object of our inquiry notto be dependent upon our ideology and our passion. To forget them, in the name of empiricism and objectivity, results merely in a naive acceptance of the conservative ideology and its very basis: the status quo. But we must liberate ourselves from this state of affairs by knowledge, by situating the actors and their ideology within the systems that are concealed behind the categories of social practice. This book therefore imposes on its reader, as it forced upon its author, a great distance between himself and social practice as well as a sustained effort to construct an analytical tool that will be as simple and as useful as possible. Perhaps it has overshot its aim and will be seen as too general in its notions. Let the reader at least know that the reason for its existence was to achieve exactly the opposite, and that I would not have labored over it if I had not seen in it a means of liberating us from the confusion of ideologies or biases, of piercing through to that most dramatic and most rallying fact of social life: the fact that society produces itself, by its work and its knowledge, by its class relations and its political interaction. Montreal Santiago de Chile Los Angeles Chatenay-Malabry
October 1%6-December 1972
Preface
xix
Note: Those interested only in the general orientation of this book can limit themselves to reading the Introduction, the first three chapters, and the conclusion. At the beginning of each of the last five chapters I have inserted a brief paragraph indicating its central theme. Possibly the prospect of having to read less than half this work will attract some who would otherwise have been frightened off by its size and style. I hope that these tentative readers will in fact be spurred on to make a further effort and read the rest.
INTRODUCTION
1. Societies learn to know themselves sociologically when they recognize themselves as the product of their labor and their social relations, when what at first seems to be a set of social 'data* is recognized as being the result of a social action, of decisions or transactions, of domination or conflicts. This is why our own age, oriented as it is toward development, is gradually creating sociology. —- T Long concealed by all the forms of social philosophy that related social \ facts to a nonsocial explanatory principle, whether providence, law, evolution, or "natural" needs, sociology is having difficulty' in freeing itself from the appeal to a creative force—energy, idea, values—that conquers and organizes an untamed nature. For that is in fact the most common form taken by the presociological thought associated with the triumph of industrialization, of industrial capitalism, and the colonial empires. Today, this social philosophy of progress, whether optimistic or pessimistic, can no longer be entertained, since our industrialized countries have""" acquired a confused but solid certainty that they always had total power over themselves, including that of destroying themselves, that of subjecting themselves to totalitarian rule, or that of increasing their product by hitherto unheard-of proportions. Having evaluated itself in the name of principles, having situated itself within an evolution, society is now coming to recognize itself as a network of actions and relations. Moreover, in order to know its present it is turning less and less toward its past, since the importance of tradition is constantly diminishing in relation to knowledge newly acquired, and increasingly toward its future, in other words toward the decisions "rt makes and the debates or conflicts that accompany them.
Introduction
This picture is too simple, and the transformation 1 describe did not start yesterday. But it has by now become evident enough to create an ever stronger demand for sociological analysis. And need I add that this demand is being satisfied only very slowly, since even where sociology is not forbidden or domesticated it is still in continual conflict with the old categories employed for analyzing social reality? It experiences difficulty in freeing itself both from appeals to the nonsocial for explaining the social and frorn_subjection^ to the "laws" or internal "logic" of a category of social facts. This violent rift between interpretation and positivist analysis ceases to be possible the moment when no metasocial authority or warrant is left to dominate society's functioning. It is no longer possible to avoid sociological analysis by subordinating it to a knowledge_pf divine order, of the essence of politics, or of homo oeconomicus. As these essences melt away, so they simultaneously dissolve the illusion that there can be nonsociological laws controlling certain social phenomena. We can no longer ask ourselves questions about the nature of society but only about its functioning, or about its orientations, its power, its decision-making mechanisms, its forms of organization and change. 2. Let us therefore accept that society rests upon nothing other thaii social action, that the social order has no metasocial warrant for its existence, whether religious, political, or economic, and is totally the product of social relations. This means that we have to accept thinking about society on the basis of the experience—a new form of experience but regarded here as exemplary—of those societies that act most profoundly upon themselves, both through economic growth and through social revolution. Such societies are defined no longer as creations of God or Prometheus but as systems of social relations. We have recognized, then, that society is a system capable of transforming itself and not merely of reproducingjtself. Is our path sufficiently defined by this initial choice? No, because from that recognition there stem two paths, whose divergence defines sociology's principal choices. It is possible to think that the end of the old dualisms, the identity of society's being with its action, must lead to a reanalysis of everything that is generally termed social structure in terms of processes of change. This means f that a society ought increasingly to be conceived of as a network of deciders, who possess a certain influence and by whose interaction the adaptation of the social whole in question to the modifications of its environment and internal changes is conducted, in an empirical, very imperfect, but acceptable manner. The disappearance of the old social philosophies ought s also to be accompanied by that of all recourse to values, to principles, and to
Introduction
absolutes in the theory and practice of social action. The more complex society is, the less mechanical it is, the more no-man's-land areas of uncertainty, of disorganization, of innovation, of deviance, of imagination it will include, while at the same time it must adapt itself increasingly to the ecosystem of which it is a part, and which is increasingly threatened by the destructive creativity of our industry. How could one fail to recognize in all this the renaissance of those themes that accompanied the industrial revolution? The liberal appeal to pragmatism, to adaptation, to openness, to change, to the pursuit of diversity and heterogeneity, plus a new awareness of the limits of our natural resources and the dangers of industrialization? It is true that the majority of sociological research does not explicitly invoke such a view, either because it is sheltering behind a dissection of reality it refuses to question, in the name of a naive objectivism, or else because it is guided by obsolete images of society, one in which there exists a social order based upon the consensus of values or, on the contrary, on an imposed domination. Yet it is in fact this neoliberalism that lies behind most o ( recent developments in sociological analysis. It has brought us a new knowledge of organizations, given central importance to decision analysis, seriously tackled the study of endogenous changes. Wishing to refer to it in a way that will invoke an approach rather than an ideology, I shall term it here "political" sociology, in order to denote not a chapter in sociology but an overall conception: society is the result of its decisions, which themselves^ refer back to the interests, arguments, conflicts, and transactions by means of which—in an always temporary and unstable way—there occur the changes that point in the direction of a greater diversification, ji growing flexibility, a relaxation of social norms, symbolic systems, and constraints. 3. I could define this book by saying that it shares with this neoliberal political sociology the idea that society is a system of social interactions and that its functioning is the result of its action, but that given this basic conception, opposed as it is to all recourse to values and essences, it explores a line of analysis that is profoundly different, both in its actual orientation and in its ideological implications. Although it is clear that society is not just a system with a pilot who must maintain that system's equilibrium and continuity by using various mechanisms of social control, at once integrating and repressive, no more can society be reduced to a system capable of modifying its aims and organization by training mechanisms and controlled reinforcement of certian forms of conduct or organization. SocietyJs not just reproduction and adaptation: it is also creation, self-production. It has the capacity to define itself and thus, through the knowledge and investment it has achieved, to transform its relations with its environment, to constitute its
Introduction
milieu. Human society possesses a capacity of symbolic creation by means of which, between a "situation" and social conduct, there occurs the formation of meaning, a systemj£jmentation of conduct. Human society Is the only natural system known to possess this capacity to form and transform its functioning on the basis of its investments and the image it has of its capacity to act on itself. This distance that society places between itself and its_ activity, and this action by which it determines the categories of its practice, 1 term historicity. Society is not what it is but what it makes itself be: through knowledge, which creates a state of relations between society and its environment; through accumulation, which subtracts a portion of available product from the cycle leading "to consumption; through the cultural model, which captures creativity in forms dependent upon the society's practical dominion over its own functioning. It creates the totality of its social and cultural orientations by means of a historical action that is both work and meaning. The image that takes shape, then, is that of a_sojnety which is not solely a system of internal and external exchanges but first and foremost an agent of its own self-production, an agent in the creation of orientations of social action on the basis of practice and consciousness of the production of work. This image does not reintroduce the old dualisms; it does not set some Promethean energy in opposition to the inertness of matter, or the march of progress against the resistances of tradition. But it does stand in opposition to the image of a society reduced to its change processes. Tf eliminates from its analysis all appeal to any "beyond" in nature, to essences, or to the march of history. It identifies society with its own action, then questions itself on that basis about the specific characteristics of social systems. We are not bound to choose between, on the one hand, reducing society to a system of the same type as a machine or an organism, and, on the other, to / invoking a social vitalism that subordinates explanation to the intervention / of forces and energies, of a meaning in evolution, or of man's fundamental 1 needs. Sociology ought to reflect on the example biology offers and construct v the type of system that will enable it to provide an account of the specific characteristics of social conduct—that it is oriented by ends—and recognize that any^ society constitutes and transforms its_own social jind cultural orientations. It is essential to such a procedure that we do not reduce society to its y functioning and its exchanges but apprehend it primarily as a process^ of self production. ^ - l n maintaining that society is always divided from itself, divided into V self-production and self-reproduction, I am also defending two important ideas:
Introduction
First, that social evolution is not continuous, nor linear, and cannot be reduced to a general tendency J o ^growing differentiation, complexity, and flexibility. On the contrary, what we need to do is differentiate between various systems of historical action all of which correspond to a particular mode of knowledge, type of accumulation, andj^ulto^mpdel, all qualitatively different From others. This is even more important for a comprehension of the present than for an ordering of the past, since what we are now entering is not a society of pure adaptation but rather a postindustrial sociely that is defined, like all others, by its orientations and its class relations, and therefore also by what it puts on display and what it pushes back into the shadows. Second, that the orientations of the system of historical action define the field of social relations, of political relations, of the forms of social organization, and therefore also the "stakes," direct or indirect, of every^ kind of conflict or negotiation, and that these orientations do not, consequently, define a bod^^of^alue^Uiat make social integration possible by its diversification into norms and role expectations. All sociology of values must be rejected, but this cannot be achieved by treating society as simply an apparatus of domination, since that would oblige us to presuppose the existence of some metasocial, "natural" order in the name of which that judgment was made; nor can it be achieved by limiting ourselves to a pragmatist vision of society, as though a dominant social order, seeking to irnpose_and reproduce itself, did not exist. The central problem of sociology UjJLMBd^stand how^asociety rests upon a set of orientations while at the same time being directed and organized by power, how it is one and also double, historicity and class relations. This problem cannoTtie resolved except be recognizing society's capacity^to determine itself by its own Historical action, by its work on its work, the orientations that govern its functioning. This distancing ofjelf from selfnec^^arily entails the division of society into two opposing classes: it is not society but a part of society, the"ruiing class, that takes over the responsibility for historicity and em_er^es^irorrnhe society's^ functioning in order to go beyond mere self-reproduction—through the use of accumulation—to knowledge. Thus one particular social^categor\r identifies itself with what is most general in society: its historicity. And this means that historicity has been made^the object of private appropriation. Those who belong noTTbThe~ruling class but to the popular class (as I shall term it) defend themselves against this domination, and against historical action itself, but also contest its private appropriation and seek to regain control of it by overthrowing the domination of the ruling class^ Thus the class conflict cannot be defined except as the strugjgle forjthg supreme "stake," which is the management or control of historical action.
Introduction
The orientations of the system^of historical action, instead_of^being translated directly into norms, are "stamped" by class relations and class domination, which enables us to reject the notion of values that introduces a direct correspondence between a society's cultural orientations and the judgments of actors on social conduct. Interposed between the former and the latter are class relations. The problem of social classes, which has remained at the center of sociological analysis since the late eighteenth century, cannot be clearly stated until one recognizes that society is_not a totality or an order but a i system, one whose principal characteristic is to produce its own orientations \ and therefore the conditions governing its functioning. If, on the contrary, one^rontinues to envisage society as a social order, then onlTmust either refer that order to the unity of a social consensus maintained by social control and socialization, a unity that is given the lie by / the very existence of social conflicts and movements and is merely an I invention of the ruling classes, or else one is forced to accept that society in its entirety is the work of domination, violence, and ideology, which presup/ poses, I repeat, that one is invoking something beyond society, a nature that [ will some day be liberated from the contradictions of society. And this idea in a great variety of forms did broadly dominate nineteenth century historicism. The development of sociology is only possible if one renounces any identification of social systems with mechanical systems—as the legal mind has done for a long time—or even with organic systems, and accepts their particular nature: instead of being governed bv a code of laws they have the / capacity to arrive at orientations that then^via)class conflicts and political mechanisms, control the categories of their practice.ThTsTolriception must eliminate all representations of society as an actor—whether termed a system of values, spirit of the age, civilization, or more concretely the State— thought of as the sovereign manager of its various activities and of the conditions of its survival as an actor. It is in this respect above all that Marx's critical analysis retains all its value as an antidote to the optical illusion that leads each and all of us to perceive social relations as subject to some unifying intention or law. 4. These then are the three notions on which this analysis is based: 7 historicity, which defines the instruments of society's self-production; the system of historical action, meaning that totality composed of social and cultural orientations, by means of which historicity exercises its dominion over society's functioning; and class relations, struggles for the control of historicity and of the system of historical action. The first three chapters of this book are devoted to a presentation of these notions.
Introduction
The fourth and fifth chapters will explain the transition from this first level of the analysis to that of political decisions, the level I shall term the institutional or —synonymously—the political system, then to that of social organization. The principal task of my analysis "will be to reconcile the hierarchy of these levels with each one's individual autonomy. This autonomy has two reasons for being: political collectivities or organizations are concrete social wholes limited by frontiers and thus possessing problems of integration or adaptation that cannot be reduced to~those of historicity; on the other hand, they are also units defined historically rather than sociologically ; and are therefore heterogeneous, so that, for example, even Great Britain in the late nineteenth century cannot be entirely identified with industrial capitalism. As for the hierarchy of the systems, this signifies that institutions and organizations alike are domains of social life far from independent of the orientations of historical action, that on the contrary they are expressions of those orientations, so that in both of these two types of system^ we find occurring as essential elements both the state of the orientations of the system of historical action and the state of class relations. Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to the actors rather than to the systems and their stracture/The first of these chapters deals with social movements, collective conduct situated at the level of the field of historicity or, in other words, at the level occupied by the system of historical action and class relations, the seat of the conflict over the control of historicity ./Chapter 7 then abandons synchronic analysis to provide an answer to the problem of social change—the most difficult problem to deal with in terms of the methodology of this book. Whereas neoliberal sociology immediately situates itself inside change, and rejects as inherited superstition everything that appears to be orientations or fundamental conflicts in a society—a position that does at least have the advantage of capturing the processes of change very directly—the priority that I accord to the study of how the field of historicity is produced, of political institutions and forms of social organization, makes explaining change very difficult. It is a problem, moreover, on which sociology in the past, whether functionalist or otherwise, has shed very little light. A theory of change must start from the tensions that exist between a field of historicity and the heterogeneous historical whole with which it is always associated. In a society where this tension is reduced to the minimum, the transition from one field of historicity to another can take place without hiatus, with "modernization" bringing about modifications in the social organization, then in the institutions, which then provoke the appearance of the necessary elements for a new system of historical action. But where there is a great deal of heterogeneity, as is the case with societies under
Introduction
domination, an inter-national class struggle arises, in which the dominant nation talks about its "modernizing action'' when it opens up markets for itself, takes its profits, imposes its culture, and in which the popular class is at the same time drawing support from its history and its individuality while also aiming, through its struggle against domination, at the creation of a field of historicity to which nothing in its experience can yet correspond. This is a reminder that the most modernizing societies are not the most modern ones, and also absolutely rules out the sociocentric ideology of the dominating societies according to which all nations form a procession, with the dominating societies at its head, and must all eventually pass through the same stages. My concern to understand the divereityjrf the modes of social transformation is as constant in this book as that to follow all the manifestations of social movements, from the defensive withdrawal into collectiveT identity,_and explosion outward into violence and deviance, to the creation of societal countermodels and entry into a general conflict over control of historical action. For nothing reveals the self-production of society more directly than the confrontation of social movements and the politics of social change. 5. Each of the domains thus defined within sociology must be analyzed as a process, not as a response to functions. We have for too long contented ourselves with simply dividing social organization roughly into institutions— judicial, political, religious, educational, military, and so on—and then comparing the forms these institutions take in different societies, either byconstructing grids of classification or by trying to discover some general evolutionary line. Even today, what arguments still go on about the functions of the political system, the nature of social classes, or the extent of religious practices. Dismembering society is not the best way of understanding how it functions and changes. Nor is ignoring the necessity for specialized research to remind ourselves that in sociology as in other fields the aim is to reach a knowledge of the fundamental mechanisms, and consequently to destroy objects as they are given in practice as rapidly as possible, so that one can then reconstruct the field of phenomena on the basis of a small number of general schemas and, at a higher level, of proven theories. This book may therefore be classified as one of general sociology, on condition that the term is not misunderstood: you will find no chapter in it on the family, on religion, on economics, and so on, as you would in the more usual "general" textbook or manual. The vocabulary of such books has been replaced with a different one, one that may occasionally cause surprise—its individual words are given in the glossary at the end of the book with their redefinitions—but that is extremely small, because its purpose is to help in
Introduction
replacing the usual superficially objective descriptions with an attempt to reconstruct the various kinds of social interactions and the relations between the social systems: the system of historical action, the system of class relations, the political or institutional system, and the organizational system, whose concatenation constitutes the functioning of society, or in other words f the mechanisms by means of which society is able to produce itself, adapt j itself, and reproduce itself.
w
6. Because he is studying conduct that has a meaning for the actors themselves, the sociologist is always in danger of becoming a Royal Historiographer, of presenting the jotaHty_of^ocial relations coherently arranged in the light of the .dominant ideology. Nor does he avoid this difficulty by relating conduct to situations, as though it were^j)Qssible to understand social relations on the basis of other categories of facts,jsucrTjas the state of technology, say, or the average level of income. Since its earliest days", sociology has never tired of pointing out that such situations, if they are to form part of its analysis, must first be reformulated in terms of social interactions. I intend to conform strictly to the central principle of sociological analysis: the meaning of conduct must be explained not by>the consciousness of J*he actor or by the situation in which he is ptoeetlf_butj>v the social interactions In whicJThe is involved. Sociology and analysis of social interactions are synonymous terms. However, we must of course distinguish various kinds of sociaTlnteractions, to which the broad chapters of sociology correspond. At the level of social organization, within a limited social whole governed by a central authority, we can isolate social interactions dependent upon roles, ' in other words upon conduct on the part of an actor in a given position that is recognized as legitimate by those with whom he interacts as occupant of that position. Relations between actors thus depend on their common participation in a social order with a set of norms. On the one hand there is reciprocity of conduct between actors occupying complementary positions in the application of a norm; on the other there is stratification—a diversity of levels of participation in the emission, the diffusion, and the consumption of wealth and conduct assigned a value by society. Here relations are ones of reciprocity and of difference. At the decision-making level, relations are of another kind. The actors are ^ no longer acting within a set^ojnorms; they are competing together in the decision-making process that establishes the legitimate norms and expectations. These therefore are relations of competition not of reciprocity' of influence not of difference. I should add, before coming to social relations at the level of historical 3, action, that on both organizationallind political levels the actor also enters
10
Introduction
into relations with other actors situated within other social wholes, and with these actors he neither shares common norms nor is expected to arrive at common decisions. These intersocial relations are sufficiently different from the other kinds to have become the principal object of study of political science. At the level of a society's field of historicity, relations are established among actors who are In a situation neither of reciprocity nor of competition but of conflict, who are placed neither on a scale of participation nor in a position of influence, but in a relation of domination. Historical action, society's work upon its own work, is exercised solely through class conflict jn a struggle that is not a simple conflict of interests or values but a battle for the control of historicity and of the social and cultural orientations of the system of historical action. These classes, these historical actors are not actors in any concrete or directly observable sense. History is not the epic tale of the capitalist class or the working class. Here as elsewhere one cannot define a social actorjrther than by analyzing his interaction with other actors. But this principle is more directly and more strictly applicable where classes are concerned. We cannot explain a particular example of conduct by saying that it belongs to a class but only by situating it in relation to the opposition between the classes and their antagonistic efforts to control the system of historical action. A sociology of action must never be identified with a reconstitution of the praxis of class actors; it is above all analysis of the relations of domination that determine conflicts, movements, and ideoiogiesT"ShTllay"relatio1fis'oT domination because the actions involved are governed by a stake, a prize, which is a set of social and cultural orientations, and beyond that historicity itself, which is an action and not a state of things. 7. These social relations are partly: openand partly hidden. They are open insofar as dominators and dominated are in conflict, struggling for_control of historicity. Society is therefore not an order, an organism; it is divided against itself; each of its orientations is the object of opposing attempts at appropriation. Hence the importance constantly given in this book to public debates, conflicts, social movements, and also the recurring criticism of illusions of social integration. They are hidden insofar as a domination is being imposed that overlays popular contestation with oppression, with alienation, with propaganda, and either fragments it or reduces it to violence or retreat. The sociologist must not identify himself with the ideology of any actor, but in order to achieve this independence, without which his work is impossible, he must throw all his weight into the task of reestablishing the nature of the social relations thus concealed, in order to let those speak that have no voice, in order to illumine
Introduction
11
that which is hidden, forbidden, or locked away, in order to break the power of ideological discourse and the false evidence in the categories of social practice. This is a task made all the more difficult by the fact that the closer one comes to the struggles and movements that animate the field of historicity, the deeper the collective actors dig themselves into their ideologies and the more determined they are to impose their values. The more ardent the struggle for social domination, or the more absolute the power, the more surely^the sociologist's critical analysis Is rejected. Caught between a simultaneously superficial and conservative "empiricism"—since it reduces the actor to his behavior within the established order—and the passions of the struggles or the pressures of power, sociology has great difficulty in surviving and in maintaining or even discovering its unity. This book in itself cannot completely satisfy either the researcher, who demands to be presented right away with methods and procedures, or the actor in collective life, who needs to situate his aims, his partners, his adversaries in time and space, and to identify himself with a group. Is there any reason why it should not be understood by both, however? The sociologist does not study facts but documents. In order not to become the prisoner of a "reality" that he believes himself to be looking in at from outside when he is in fact part of it, he needs to subject himself to an intellectual ascesis that will lead him to the discovery, behind society's organization and discourse, of its social relations, m j>ther words of its conflicts and its domination, as well as what that domination keeps concealed in the shadows. And the person who takes part in the battles or in the government of society, can he on his side understand his own action if he reduces society to the established order, or to a mere battlefield, or to a mere market? Can he be a stranger to a sociology whose principle object is to understand how men make their history, through their work and their social relations? This book speaks of society through sociology. It is by reflecting on his own work of acquiring knowledge that the sociologist best answers the questions of the social actors themselves. Because his ta^k^is to\stri£jbare social relations and social processes by freeing himself from all the social and ideological forms of censorship that established power and order use to protect and justify themselves. Only in this way can sociology ensure its own continued existence. Every time it attempts to find order in real life and derive general laws from it, every time it attempts to explain structure and change with the help of the same notions, it is no more than an irrelevant embellishment of history. It must turn its face away without regret from both universal histories and general sociologies whose aim is to situate
12
Introduction
societies and explain them. And what better rallying ground against such a pseudoscience of societies could there be than a sociology of action? What could proclaim more clearly that there is no sociology of social situations but only of social relations? Sociology is not alone in its haste to take such a path. Other disciplines which have simple models of social relations to deal with, and economics especially, have progressed much more rapidly toward their formalization. Sociology is making slower progress because the wholes it has to deal with are more complex. Which is why it will continue to advance for a long while in two complementary ways: by isolating particular sets of social relations susceptible of a more detailed treatment, and by the construction of theoretical schemas, still not very formalized but representing progress in the definition of a procedure and the identification of the mechanisms studied. 8. This book begins with a study of abstract ensembles, such as historicity, the system of historical action, and class relations, then moves on in later chapters to more concrete collectivities such as a political system or an organization and mechanisms of change. Why didn't 1 choose the reverse order? Why not start from limited but more detailed analyses in order to demonstrate the necessity for resorting to certain concepts that are then clearly set out in a conclusion? Because this book_ is not a presentation of^ fieldwork but is intended solely as an introduction to a sociological procedural method. The most urgent factor therefore was to follow the general line of that procedure, and its principal characteristic is that it does not take socia^ organization as its starting point but rather the production of society by itself, in otheFwords a set" oTsocial mechanisms not directly given to an observation that is in fact in danger of being imprisoned by the categories of social praxis, which are always impregnated with ideologies. If the type of analysis presented here seems interesting, then wluu will be needed, rather than seeking to make it more precise and to complete it by a revision of the reasoning itself, is to ask oneself more directly about the methods that need to be invented or applied in order to develop objects of research corresponding to the principles of the reasoning, and in order to verify the propositions deriving from it. This book is therefore concerned not with presenting a sociological theory, which would be excessively ambitious, but only with putting the sociologist in a position to undertake analyses that may lead to the production of an integrated set of propositions. Although it is rather long, and may look rather daunting, this book should be approached as a brief introduction to a set of possible investigations. More simply still, it is intended to contribute to the opening up of a domain of knowledge indispensable to societies that can no longer define themselves by their action upon a supposedly external nature, but must recognize that
Introduction
13
they are the product of the action they exert upon themselves, via their system of historical action, their class relations, their political institutions, and Jheir forms of social organization. In the longer term, it is trying to introduce readers to the quest for a new sociological practice, capable of making its way across the best lit and most closely controlled areas of social life in order to reach the conduct by which a society produces and transforms itself. It should be said finally that this book, so far from appearing to be an analysis of social actuality, nevertheless sprang from reflections and unease aroused by the times in which it was written. Those who make economic and political decisions are increasingly aware that they must intervene in the totality of social life. Growth cannot be assured without social and political mobilization or, on the other hand, without an ideological campaign to boost the profits of enterprise. These leaders impose their Utopia and their ideology on societies, identify themselves with "the satisfaction of needs/* with prosperity, with innovation and equalization of opportunity. The dominion of leaders over societies has increased to an enormous extent, and the outstanding features of our century, our trademark in times to come, will be that a whole society could be possessed by the word and the letter of a leader, that language became a material force, that incantation created organization. Faced with this new power of society's decision centers, confusion reigns. / Some are drawn into the action of the apparatuses, others throw up ^ barricades that were originally intended for use against another enemy, yet \ others are questioning society in its entirety rather than simply its power. J Must we renounce the belief that the new power will meet with new adversaries? It is already too late to sell that opium of the "end of ideologies/' The universities, and above all the relatively small areas within them occupied by the sociologists, have been among the first to see the reappearance of social movements, or at least of their heralding signs. How can the sociologist believe that what he writes is neutral, a matter of indifference, faced as he is with this great question that dominates our present: what are and what will be the actors, the fields, and rtie stakes ofthe social battles to be fought in those societies within which power extends to all the aspects of collective activity, so that it can no longer be called political or economic and must therefore be recognized as the management and appropriation of social organization and social change? This book is paving the way for a reply to that question. More, it is trying to prove that it is overwhelmingly important for it to be asked. But how can we fait to"Tecognize ^^JJL^L0-^!!-0^^^1^^ am * liberal European societies, which are those in which it is easiest to acquire information, to think, and to express oneself
14
Introduction
freely^arejilso those in which the demand for a liberating future is making itself rtie least heard. That is why this book is addressed not only to French readers but equally to all those in the world whose deepest experience is that of domination, and who believe both in the necessity to fight it and in the possibility that the masses of mankind will one day make their own history. It owes much on the one hand to the great intellectual movement that has renewed Latin-American sociology and to the new awareness achieved by the people of Quebec, and on the other hand to the questionings, the debates of American society and culture. It will at no point depart from its proper field, that of sociological reflection, and will not seek to draw false heat from the fire of events. But the author, who will be absent from the book, does have the right, at the moment of leaving it, to say why he devoted the midyears of his life to it.
HISDRICITY
1 A.
Society Turns Back upon Itself
a.
Beyond Function
Human societies cannot he sufficiently defined by their rules and the instruments by which they function. They act upon their own functioning, either to modify it or to transcend it. 1. First, by applied experience, or in other words by politics. The norms that govern social interactions are not intangible; they are in large part the result of decisions and in consequence can be modified as the result of a change in the relations of force or influence between actors, and also as the result of modification occurring in the environment. Modern analyses of organization and decision m a k i n g have greatly extended our knowledge of society's internal and external exchanges and consequently of the temporary and partial character of its norms, which are the products of interaction and transactions. As a political actor society no longer resembles an organism ensuring its stability by homeostasis; it is constantly modifying its activities and its organization by adaptation. 2. Second, by what I term historicity. Human society cannot be reduced to an organism always reproducing itself immutably, dependent for any transformation in itself upon mutations brought about by internal or external events. Its capability is not limited to adapting itself to a changing environment and is constantly modifying the rules by which it functions. It also has the capability of positing, beside the order of its activities, the order of its representations. It possesses a symbolic capacity that enables it to construct a system of knowledge together with technical tools which it can use to intervene in its own functioning. 15
16
Chapter One
But we must go further. This capacity for acting upon itself, this noncoincidence of society with its own rules of functioning, must be much more than just the creation of the order of words beside the order of things. This "double" of society must also have means of action, of intervention in the material functioning of society, and therefore means of investment. Lastly, this distance between society and itself is also apprehended by social consciousness. A tragic and arrogant apprehension, because it is simultaneously apprehension of a wrenching asunder and of a dominion. Inventor of knowledge, agent of investment, creator of an image oj creativity that 1 term a cultural model, society j)roduces itself, imposes a meaning on its pj-actices, turns back upon itwljAt does not exist solely in nature; it does not possessa history only; it possesses historicity, which is the capacity to produce its own social a.nd_cjjl_tjural field, its own historical environment. Society produces itself. This cannot mean that it creates the conditions of its existence starting from an idea. For where would this idea come from, and how could it be conceived of other than as a metasocial warrant for social organization—divine providence, human nature, idea, march of history? But nor can it mean that these representations and these orientations have been formed on the basis of a material experience that could be defined independently of them. We must not search here for any first cause. Labor is a state of the forces i of production determined by historicity, that is to say by a model of knowledge, by a type of accumulation, and by an image of creativity or cultural model; but these components of historiciTy~always appear as""a" distancing of society from itself and from the reproduction of its functioning. The specific characteristic jyfjiuman society is precisely this distance between the totality oj[ the activities that define a society's functioning and I the system of meaning that simultaneously determmes it anTVsTorrried on X the basis of it. in a circle that will only appear vicious if one is looking for a first cause, and which on the contrary defines the particularity of society as a system when compared to other concrete systems. To sum up, a certain historicity expresses itself through certain characteristics of the social organization, a level of productivity, a capacity for growth, and a technical division of labor. It is on the basis of this organization of labor that accumulation makes it possible to emerge from the economic cycle and that the cultural model occupies the gap formed between historicity and functioning. Historicity is always linked to a material situation; it gives it meaning, informs it. One must reject equally both the idea that the forms of social life are determined by a material situation, such as the state of technology, and also the contrary idea that society imposes culture upon nature, writes civilization on the virgin page of an untamed natural world.
Historicity
17
Historicity is neither idea nor material situation; it is the specific characteristic of social action, which constitutes its experience through the meaning it gives to it. Human activity, on all levels of technical development, is the organization of a technical environment and not integration into a natural whole. From first hunter to missile builder, man is the producer of techniques. Analysis must start from this action, which is simultaneously instrumental, economic, and ideological, to use terms that are at the same time in everyday use yet laden with obscurities; which is a model ot knowledge, accumulation, and cultural model, to use the terms 1 shall employ here, referring to the organization of a field of experience, the setting aside of a proportion of the resources available for consumption, and an image ol creativity. Historicity is not transcendence; it is not that which escapes from society conceived of as a system. On the contrary, it is that which makes it possible to conceive of society as a system, but without having to reduce it to another and less complex type. Through historicity activity becomes meaning and meaning once more becomes practice. It is this double movement, up toward historicity and—even more important—down from it, through the system of historical action, society's institutions and organizations, that will constitute one of the two central themes of this book. The second is an investigation of the forms of social interaction linked with historicity and with the production of society by society itself: class relations. It is a mistake to criticize the functionalist sociologies of integration and values by confronting them with the histoiy of societies or by the forces of conflict and change with them. One runs a great risk of being forced back into presociological interpretations. 1 do not blame functionalist sociology for having represented society as a ) system; that is its great positive contribution. Its error was to conceive that ( system in accordance with mechanistic ororganistic images so inadequate that they simultaneously force one back to an evolutionist vision, inherited \ from nineteenth-century liberal and positivist optimism, impregnated with , the most unacceptable kind of idealism and ethnocentrism. b.
The Components of Historicity: Knowledge, Accumulation, Cultural Model.
1. Serge Moscovici {Essai sur Vhistoire humaine de la natures Paris: Flammarion, 1%8, and more recently, la socike comre nature, Paris: Union g£n£rale d'exlitions, coll. 10/18, 1972, see also "Le marxisme et la question naturelle," L'hommi* et la sotiete, July-September 1969, pp. 59-109) has pointed out with some force that society is not in opposition to nature and that it is consequently false to distinguish between the natural
18
Chapter One
order and social values, between the body and the soul of social activity. Nature is a cultural definition of matter. Thus we ought not to speak of nature but of "states of nature", which is to say, of systems of knowledge. This work of knowledge is never identifiable with economic activity. Production and consumption are economic categories that always pertain to a study of exchanges. But any system of labor also includes the intervention of "natural forces," of an activity of knowledge. Science, for example, is not an economic element, does not in itself have a price, because it does not produce goods but. rather, endows society with a nature, as religious thought did in another type of society. This first component of historicity, the model of knowledge, is at the same time the most fundamental and the one that will play the most limited role in our analysis of society. It is fundamental because it manifests most directly the human capacity to create through knowledge an image of the world and social relations and an image of the nonsocial. Before coming to any particular piece of sociological analysis we encounter the primary fact that human language orders a universe organized by technique, thus permitting the turning back of experience on itself that enables man—and man alone—to have a history, in other words, to produce not only his changing but his situation itself. However, the fundamental role of this component also makes it dependent. It does not govern the orientations of social and cultural action or the forms of accumulation and relations of production directly. Itself a force of production par excellence, it appears both at the very beginning and at the very end of the analysis: a set ot means and technical operations on the one hand, and on the other a sign oi society's distance in relation to its own functioning. 2. This separation between the two orders of phenomena lumped together under the name of work is not conceivable without a recognition of the economic forms of historicity. The existence of work on work presupposes a process of accumulation. One part of the consumable product is set aside and invested in works that bear the stamp of the cultural model. The closer one comes to industrialized "societies the more this accumulation is identifiable with productive investment. Whereas, on the other hand, in societies with a weak historicity, with only a slight capability of action upon themselves, the uses to which the accumulated resources are put are not directly productive: temples and priests, castles and courts absorb the surplus withdrawn from consumption. But accumulation always has economic uses, since those who control it, even if their central role is a religious or political one, are filling a role essential to production. The greater the amount of accumulation the greater the extent to which it transforms the conditions of production. When it is small, the
Historicity
19
surplus collected is set aside from economic activity and used for the realization of major constructions or works. On the other hand, an important share of the resources accumulated in an industrialized society is used to transform the conditions of labor directly and to produce labor, which is the role of technology. Investment modifies the organization of work and thus its productivity. 3. A society is not adequately defined by the state of its productive forces; such a definition ought to be derived from the relations between its activity and its capability of acting on that activity. This distance is apprehended culturally: every society is oriented by this apprehension of creativity, which 1 term its cultural model. In a society with a strong historicity, which is to say one in which the production of labor exercises a strong control over the production of wealth, this apprehension of creativity is practiced: science is recognized as creativity, as the force directly transforming the state of nature. In a society with a weak historicity, on the other hand, creativity is apprehended only abstractly, not as praxis but as /gus. as a rnetasocial order./! his cultural model is not a representation of the model of knowledge but of tlie~ distance between trie production and the reproduction of work, and thus of society's capability of acting upon itself. 1 therefore use the phrase "cultural model" in a very specific sense, not in order to describe such and such an orientation or observable value within a society, but to define, within A conceptual system, that essential aspect of historicity by means of which the society "reflects" upon itself by apprehending its own capability of action in a way that defines the field of social relations and what I shall call in the next chapter the system o\% historical act ion ./Let me say right away, however, that even when historicity is most completely controlled by the ruling class, the cultural model is not reducible to the dominant ideology. Ideology pertains to specific actors; the cultural model pertains to a type oj society as totality, it contributes to a definition of the field of social relations. The actors, however much opposed to each other they may be. interact and enter into conflict within a cultural model. All this shows that a cultural model cannot be situated other than qualitatively in relation to other cultural models. Each cultural model contributes toJhe definition ofji type of society, not to that of a specific collectivity. This cultural model is not a system of values. It entails no judgment as to what is socially good or bad. It defines a cultural field. Let one example suffice: to recognize science as the contemporary form of creativity * does * Which is the specific characteristic of postindustrial society in which science is at the same time model of knowledge, cultural model, and even instrument of accumulation. In the sentence above, science is viewed soleK as a cul'.urcl model.
20
Chapter One
not in itself entail any judgment on the positive or negative aspects of a society dominated by science. One may say with equal justification either that science creates plenty or that it is threatening humanity with total destruction. It is in this sense that science is not a social value, that it does not distinguish positive conduct from negative conduct. The orientations of historical action do not constitute principles enthroned at the center of society and directly defining forms of social organization, because society is not an actor, a sovereign, a legislator. They define the thematic of a society, not its government. c. Society Torn Apart. The fact that a society produces itself and is not reducible to its functioning leads directly to the existence of opposing social classes and the conflict between them. It is not society as a whole that turns back upon jtself in-order to orient itself. It is always Utopian to think that a collectivity transforms itself, is capable of simultaneously acting in accordance with certain forms and transcending them, of providing for investment as well as for consumption. The class that manages society's accumulation, its model of knowledge, and its cultural model is the society's ruling class. This class identifies itself with the society's historicity. But since it is no more than one part of society, it is therefore also identifying historicity with its private interests, confusing the cultural model with its own ideology. The ruled class reacts to this domination both defensively, by insisting on its own social and cultural identity, and offensively, by contesting the power of the ruling class, by appealing to the very historicity that the ruling class is appropriating. It is /therefore clear that the orientations of historicity do not by themselves I determine rules of conduct, because between them we find interposed the class conflict and the nature of social domination. The orientations of historical actionare the^stake"' in the class struggle. Which means both that they are not the ideology of the ruling class and that they are not independent of class relations, which otherwise would be no more than a mode of social stratification. Class relations are linked to forces of production, to a state of economic activity and technical division of labor; but they are more than this: they are the expression of historical action itself in terms of social actors, the / expression of society's capacity to act upon itself by its investment of the 1 resources accumulated in activities selected by a cultural model. But it is the state of class relations that governs the mechanisms of decision in a society, and thus too the formation of the rules that in their turn govern social organization, thereby enabling us to reject any sociology of values.
Historicity
21
A long chapter (3) will be devoted to class relations; but the main lines of it need to be indicated here. We cannot present the ruling class as purely creative, as the class that makes it possible to step aside from routine and the defense of immediate interests in order to tackle long-term projects, general ideas, complex strategies. That would obviously ignore the fact that the ruling class defends private interests and privileges and, even more important, the fact that it dominates the lower classes, the workers. But nor can one reduce accumulation to a class relation, that of exploiter and exploited. In particular, the closer one approaches to the industrialized societies the more productivity of work is defined not by individual work alone or even that of the team, but by the forms of organization, of the overall programming of production, and by the application of science, technology, and mathematics to economic activity. A simple observation, but one that prevents us from presenting labor relations as simply a confrontation between worker-producer and profit taker. The essential thing is to recognize that the always present, always essential relation of domination to exploitation is not separable—if we are to understand the functioning of society as the conduct of actors—from society's relation to its historicity. It is not enough to say that the ruling class performs the task of developing the forces of production. For to say that is stating a material fact but telling us nothing about its social significance. But if we try to see what lies beneath it, we discover the tug the ruling class exerts on the whole of society toward a particular type of historicity. Of the three components of historicity, accumulation is the one that makes possible the wrenching away of historicity from activity, the distancing of society from its own functioning. The mode of knowledge posits the fact of society's noncoincidence with its being: beside those shackling activities governed by the requirements of the collectivity's survival and its adaptation to the environment from which it draws its subsistence, it sets the wrorld of the image (to use the word adopted by Kenneth Boulding in The Image: Knowledge and Life in Society, University of Michigan Press, 1956). Accumulation gives a material content to this distancing. Economic activity is not reducible to the production-consumption cycle; what is subtracted from that cycle is used in the service of society's transcendence of itself, whether it be a transcendence toward the future, a process of growth, or a transcendence directed toward a principle of order and unity, either of a religious or of a political type. It is now easier to see what historicity is. In order to define it, must we make a hypothesis about the orientations of human action? Must we set up an image of a man drawn by his will to creation, his desire for enrichment, or more generally still by a need to work?
22
Chapter One
It is normal that there should emerge a favored image of man in every society, a type of hero. But this very fact, which would become less clear on closer examination, shows plainly that it cannot constitute a principle of explanation, since these human types change from one era and one society to another. To speak of human nature in this sense is a roundabout way either of introducing an ideology or of describing certain aspects of one society. If we try to explain society by means of social conducts, then we condemn ourselves to the inability to produce anything but interpretations of society, since we have introduced at the outset that which must be explained. But it is equally impossible to look upon social situations as material "facts," when by their very definition they are sets of conducts and of social relations, in other words of actions. For the sociologist, to posit an opposition between the network of social relations and the priority of "material" activities—the activities of production and reproduction of individual and collective existence—can have no meaning. Such an idea belongs merely to historicist thought; whether one posits over and above society the development of the mind or the priority of "natural" needs and the activities intended to satisfy them, one is still explaining society by the nonsocial; it is obvious that this method is as unacceptable today as it was when Durkheim condemned it. We must also eliminate other, less crude concepts of society that equally omit all recourse to the concept of actions. We cannot consider a society as an organism endowed with balancing mechanisms that is able to transform itself in the direction of a growing complexity simply under the influence of external stimuli. Even less can we consider it as a being endowed with a sort of built-in code that will modify itself as a result of mutations occurring during its transmission, change then being the result of individual actions sanctioned by their efficacy, their material success, and reacting on the social code to transform it. We are bound to recognize that human collectivities are systems defined in their specific and essential characteristics not by their code of functioning but by their capacity to be oriented by a cultural model. What I term historicity is thus the particular nature of social systems which, above and beyond their reproduction combined with any accidents "that might make them change, and also beyond their possibilities for trial-and-error and adaptation, have the capacity to act upon themselves through the intermediary of a set of cultural and social orientations. All societies are at the same time activities and a ''reflection" upon those activities, which in its turn governs the orientations of social action, the mechanisms of decision and the modalities of functioning in concrete societies. Their capacity to modify their relation with the environment is manifested
Historicity
23
in a model of knowledge, in a type ot accumulation, and in a cultural model that together constitute historicity. This latter governs a system of orientations that controls the systems of functioning and adaptation. The content of historicity depends upon the society's type of activity, on its labor, but transforms that activity into culture and into social organization. Society governs its activity by the molding of knowledge, by accumulation, by awareness of creativity, so that all aspects of its organization become at the same time means in ihe service of that production of society by itself. Social organization as such is not exclusive to the human species, but mankind is the only species that possesses sufficient symbolic capability to produce the sense—both meaning and direction—of its experience; the only one for which nature is culture, creation, and normative orientation, in the name of which triad its organization is organized, transformed, and, I repeat, produced. Human societies are open systems not only capable of modifying their goals, but also possessed of the capacity to create normatively oriented conducts, to produce and to destroy their social order. This capacity does not entirely define social life. Scciety functions on three levels: it produces itself, but it also adapts itstlfand consumes itself. And these three levels 1 shall term in Ihis book: the field of historicity, the institutional system, and the social organization. But if historicity must be the central theme of sociology, that is because only human societies possess such a capacity of self-transformation, which is linked to the human being's symbolic capacity, in other words tohis ability to aci upon his relation to his environment and upon his social organization. It is possible that a society might lose its historicity, that it might sink into mere reproduction or divide itself totally into a mass and an elite; it is also possible that it could cease to be capable of adaptation, in other words that it might reduce itself wholly to its political system, to the strategies of its members and to its own strategy with regard to other societies. A human society can be a system of historicity; it is not driven along as though in spite of itself by a force running through it, by the march of history or some transhistoric essence. Historicity is neither a typeof conduct nor an impersonal force: it is the production of society by society. The evolutionist philosophies of history which made use of notions of force and energy must be completely replaced by the study of historic action, in other words of the elements whose interrelations define the action of society's self-transformation. There is no question of introducing a theory of social change at this point; it is neither convention nor coivenience that has made social change the theme of this book's final chapter. A society's historicity is not the process that causes it to pass from state T to state T-FL It is a concept strictly defined within a synchronic analysis. A society constitutes in
24
Chapter One
terms of its resources an image that is not a representation but a set of schemas of cultural and social orientations that mold the collective experience: model of knowledge, type of accumulation, cultural model. This historicity is realized in a system of historical action and in class relations, in a political system and in forms of social organization. Rather than placing a society in history, we are talking about placing historicity in the heart of society as the organizing principle of a field of practices and relations./Thus, not only is an analysis of change inappropriate, but, further, in many ways this approach makes such an analysis more difficult, since it cannot then be undertaken other than on the basis of research into the tensions and noncoincidences between the historicity of a society and the nature of the forms of social practice that are informed by it while at the same time escaping from it as concrete, complex, 4*historicaT, social unities. Change cannot be understood except on the basis of the opposition between structure and event. Historicity, as the foundation of social structure, is neither an idea nor a material force. It is useless to ask oneself whether it falls into the category of economics, politics, or ideology. Those terms themselves merely produce confusion, or, even worse, refer back to a separation between subject and object absolutely incompatible with the task of sociology, which is to study social action. For social action is at once labor and consciousness, practice and orientation, mechanisms and finalities, all always inseparable. d.
Tensions and Conflicts
Having placed the theme of historicity at the outset of this analysis, I had better also take precautions against possible misunderstandings. Certainly, J^ have no intention of intoning a hymn of praise to the creative power of man, governing and ordering an untamed nature and led by his own inspiration, the impulse of his soul, or divine grace, beyond the everydayness of the world. Such a vision of things—which can take less crude forms—expresses the presociological thought that cannot be transcended until the moment society discovers that it in fact possesses virtually unlimited power over itself. By separating society's soul from its body, this vision is presupposing that the existence of that soul has a warrant in some essence—Man, God, History— and that social facts have no meaning other than the actor's intention and internal life, which impose themselves upon an inert nature. When one disencumbers oneself from all recourse to idealist notions, then nature ceases to be either savage or paradisiac; it is simply a set of natural systems, open or closed, functioning in accordance with laws which it is the business of science to discover. The further we move away from an abstract humanism, the vaster the field
Historicity
25
of these natural systems within human existence reveals itself to be. Hence the steady extension of the natural sciences. But we cannot separate this recognition of "human nature" from the formulation of the specific charactenstics of society and the human species. Man molds his environment and his social organization; he does not insert himself into an ecological whole; he organizes that whole on the basis of his own transforming activity. In a word, he has a history. It is this capacity to produce his own transformation that I call historicity, and which is at the same time activity and self-consciousness, work of knowledge and cultural model. This historicity does not give form to the formless; on the contrary, it is linked to existing natural systems: the biological being, including the human mind, the interpersonal relations through which personality is formed, and the forms of sociability. Corresponding to each state of historicity there is a certain "nature" that is its complement and its opposite, but it is not in ' historicity's power to determine the characteristics of the natural systems that organize the activity on the basis of which historicity is formed, and which it in its turn governs. All reflection on historicity should shed light on the close bond between two apparently opposed ideas whose complementarity must be understood. First, I the relation between social activity and historicity is circular. Historicity comes into being on the basis of a state of collective activity: its content is determined by the form of that activity. In the other direction, social organization always results from the dominion of sociocultural orientations and class relations—themselves governed by historicity—over resources and sets of means. Why should this be called a vicious circle? On the contrary, it is a question of positing the most elementary condition of all for the existence of any sociological analysis. Once that circle is broken, idealism will flood in. Historicity is not an idea but a concept introduced with the sole purpose of destroying, root and branch, all appeal to any metasocial warrant for social order. Society is what it makes itself be on the basis of what it is, and not on the basis of principles or values that cannot be anything, for the sociologist, but ideologies pertaining to particular actors. Second, this interdependence of activity and historicity, of work and of work uporTwork, is tension and distancing. Hence the emphasis I put upon providing a sociology of historicity, m actionalist sociology, in opposition to current work inspired by functionalism, even though the latter^no longer appears today as anything more than a somewhat vague orientation, lacking the academic power it had at the time when I first began my fight against it. It is a constant tendency of sociology, often in the name of empiricism, to accept the social order as being neutral and to see each individual occupying his place within it, entering into relations with others, in order to realize a
26
Chapter One
series of exchanges within that order in conformity with the rules of the social game. The actor carries his status and his role around with him, justTs the laborer wears on his coveralls the name of his firm, which is taken to be his group and therefore his social being. It is a naively conservative sociology in consequence, one that examines with the minutest attention how society functions while taking pains at least equally great to avoid asking itself what is functioning. Society viewed in its historicity, and consequently social actors too, as participants in that historicity, cannot be defined by their content but, primarily, by the gap, the distance, separating the production of society by itself from the reproduction of its activity. This means in the first place that analysis of society is not built up directly around the content of historicity but around the tension between historicity and the natural systems mobilized by social activity. We shall encounter this fundamental tension, in changing forms, at every level of society, and its recognition imposes a critical procedure diametrically opposed to that of positivism. This means in turn that no actor is alone the bearer of this tension. It is a system oj social interactions or class relations that constitutes the unity of action within which this tension manifests itself. It is impossible to single out each individual's place, or to insert each individual in a proper place, because society is not a game in which there are pawns that have rights and are subject to constraints. Social relations govern the relations^etyveen historicity and society's functioning. And in parallel to this, as I have already pointed out, the most fundamental social interactions of all, class relations, cannot be understood except as historicity at work. One might wonder at this point what mark historicity stamps upon the social actors. My analysis of social movements will answer this question in essence, since such movements are the confrontation of agents of the social classes seeking control over historicity and over the mode of society's production of itself. This is a theme that corresponds to the circularity of activity and historicity that I have recognized as being one of the faces of the sociology of historicity. What is there that corresponds in the same way to its other face, to the recognition of tension and rending? The ultimate mark jof ^participation in historicity is the distance that remains between the actor and the roles he plays, not only in social exchanges of all kinds, but even within social movements, insofar as these latter have no concrete existence unless they are also political—or even military—organizations and units. Instead of the call to liberty referring to some human essence beyond all social determinisms, a procedure both unacceptable and incomprehensible to the sociologist, instead of liberty being no more than the uncertainty lying at the intersection of a number of independent series, liberty is trans-
Historicity
27
cendence toward a historicity that no actor ever has the right to appropriate completely, that no form of social organization, no system of political decision making, no system ot class relations can totally exhaust, because they are all stages of historicity's redescent toward the functioning of society. Transcendence and not possession. The moment the actor identifies himself with historicity he is confusing it with an organization, which may be without social consequences if that confusion is perpetrated merely by an individual actor enclosed within a personal Utopia, but which produces the most dramatic effects when the holder of a power, reversing the movement of analysis, identifies historicity vith order and identifies himself with that now sanctified order.
B.
Historical Action
a.
The Historical Subject
Actionalist sociology reminds us that a society does not coincide with its functioning, its norms, its rules, and its sanctions, that it carries its own self-transcendence within itself. But it has fallen into error if it apprehends this trandscendence as an absolute that is transcending social contingencies and determinations, if it sets up a philosophy of liberty in opposition to social determinisms. Because there is in fact nothing that enables sociological analysis to distinguish between this creative transcendence and the disorganization of the crisis. One cannot set the frozen and instituted against an instituting spontaneity without running the risk of being unable to distinguish this suprasocial from an infrasocial, from those organic energies Parsons speaks of which constitute for him the lower environment of social action. The failure here comes from the fact that reflection remains purely polemical. It starts out from social organization, taken to be closed and totally controlled, in order to rebel against it. My procedure is different h starts quite deliberately not from the rejection of that closed society but from an affirmation of historical action. This action is not an endless transcending of social determinations but the construction of a field of action. It introduces not a philosophy of the subject but an actionalist sociology. Instead of opposing subject to society, what is aimed at here is a direct analysis of society not as consciousness of self but as work upon self. When I employed the terra historical subject in Sociologie de I'action (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1965). it was in order to define, not an actor involved in his struggle to apprehend himself in his creativity and beyond his alienations, but a society as a historical field, as a model of knowledge, a
28
Chapter One
mode of accumulation and a cultural model defining creativity the three elements present in every social constitution and transformation. The historical subject is not a new avatar of God, of the Sovereign, or of the laws of the market. It is not a personage but another name for a society's field of historicity; it is the totality of cultural orientations and social conflicts through which a society constitutes itself as an agent of historicity. If I believe this term to be useful, despite the misunderstanding it could give rise to, it is as a means of emphasizing that sociological analysis cannot have its foundation in the search for structures that are like those of the human mind or of exchanges that will permit the survival of a collectivity. Sociology is different from anthropology both in the type of societies k studies and even more in its method of approach. It views society as the work of an action, which is not that of an empirical actor, nor a collective consciousness, but a working of society upon itself. All other aspects of social life, decision making as well as the functioning of the social organization, are determined by historicity, which constitutes the sociocultural field within which class relations, political decisions, and the mechanisms of social control come into play. If the use I make of the word "subject" is going to lead to a belief that I am~representing society as a will, as an actor, then T renounce the word forthwith; sociology studies nothing other than systems of social relations. The historicity I talk about is not the work of an actor; it is the characteristic of society at the level 1 define as that of the production of society by itself, or, which is the same thing, of society as historical subject. The nearer one approaches this level of analysis the more one must leave behind any subjective meaning of conduct. If one looks at things from a functionalist viewpoint, then analysis naturally bears upon social conduct and upon the representation that the actor provides for himself of the system and the place he occupies within it. Society then appears as a datum from the actor's point of view, as a set of interiorized rules for guiding conduct. A sociology of historical action, on the other hand, is at the opposite pole from a study of subjectivity. Instead of looking at actors as defined by their roles, it examines the elements that constitute a field of historical action, which is to say the social and cultural models on the basis of which a society is organized. The actor is defined by the social and cultural movements that cause him to intervene on the level of historicity. Functionalist analysis has the apparent advantage of examining *4men as they are," in other words, of observing the "normal" functioning of society. Actionalist analysis, on the other hand, has a greater awareness of the domination exercised by a class or \ by holders of pow^rand of conflicts over the control of historicity. It analyzes I not only the various combinations of innovation and repression on the part of
Historichy
29
the ruling classes but also, on the part of the ruled classes, the always living presence of movements aimed at the collective reappropriation of historicity, and of the various forms of rejection, of withdrawal, of defense against the ruling order. It knows that history is never epic, that actors are never completely conscious and organized, that the meaning of events never coTricKTes with the consciousness of the actors, and that its battles cannot be described like those in an eighteenth-century engraving. The actors, though they may be aware of being engaged in a historical action and social conflicts, cannot be viewed as bearers of that action's meaning in their individual representations. b.
Between Integration and Contradiction
We can now return to our point of departure and redefine the place of actionalist sociology within sociological analysis as a whole. One of its principal objectives is to rescue sociology from the false choice situation in which it too often becomes enmeshed. For it does look, superficially, as though it is bound to choose between an ideal5t"phTTosbphy of values and an analysis of the internal contradictions of an economic and social system and of the all-powerful apparatus of a class domination. I will give one example only. If we examine the sociology of development, it seems to be divided into two schools: on one side the school that talks about modernization and observes both the progress of rationality or organic solidarity and the traditionalist resistances to change; on the other, the school that reduces the dynamic of the underdeveloped nations to the effects of domination exercised upon them by the great capitalist powers. This second school seems to me more securely based than the first; it puts its emphasis on a social relation of essential importance instead of artificially placing dominant and dominated societies on a scale of development a la Rostow that is too ethnocentric not to be an ideological tool for use on behalf of the colonizers. But why should there be this gap between modernization and dependence? Is not the essential thing, rather, to understand the independence movements, the nationalisms, the popular or messianic groupings, the union and political movements, and also the formation of a ruling class and its links with foreign capital or the state, through which an action of development arises that either struggles against dependence or, on the contrary, reinforces it and cannot be reduced to simply modernization, since it is determining the type of tkmodernized'* society being built? / refuse to chtmse between the reduction of social conduct to roles or adaptation to change, on the one hand* and, on the other, an image of society as a system motivated by the logic of domination alone. Other social conducts, other social relations exist. Political relations exist—at least where
30
Chapter One
totalitarianism is not supreme—a plurality of influences, a certain autonomy of decision within a society. Above all there exist social conflicts and movements, and therefore, even beyond political institutions, an "openness'* of society, a debate on the orientation of change. The long period of exceptional growth experienced recently by the industrial societies—to which the great majority of sociologists have belonged until now—has given an extreme force to the ideology of the ruling class: all the talk in our part of the world has been about modernization, about adaptation, even about a decline in conflicts and ideologies. And, against that ideology and the class domination it reinforces, it is natural that criticism, lacking support from the organized action of new social movements, should have torn itself away from the dominant discourse in order to pass judgment from outside on the objective reality of domination. However, although that step was politically indispensable, we must make certain we know how to go beyond it and to rediscover in our society, as in any society in movement, the conjoined realities of cultural orientations and social conflicts. Society is not merely a system of norms or a system of domination: it is a system of social relations, of debates and conflicts, of political initiatives and claims, of ideologies and alienations. Sociology is never faced with a choice between an analysis of subjectivity and an analysis of objectivity, because the very nature of the conduct it studies is to belong to neither of those two orders. Men make their history not by their intentions and their values but by the meaning of trie action tHat society exercises upon itself, an action that is simultaneously subjective and objective, defined conjointly by an accumulation and a cultural model. There lies the central domain of sociological analysis. It is not all of sociology however. For the domination of the ruling class is always gTeat enough for its innovative action on the one hand to give a certain autonomy to the theme of modernization, and on the other for its power to constitute a system of domination, of repression, of exploitation, that possesses its own specific logic; this domination is also often sufficiently limited for the political process to possess a space of its own within it. We must keep the autonomy of these social processes in mind in order to protect actionalist sociology against the ever-present risk it faces of being turned into a philosophy of freedom and an epic vision of history. But this autonomy cannot be independence. One is never justified in defining a society as modern or traditionalist, as universalist or particularism or in affirming that social organization can be reduced to the pure implementation of domination, since the dominant class is not in a position to define the mode of knowledge, the type of accumulation, and the cultural model that constitute the historicity within which it acts: in sum, one cannot
Historicity
31
consider a society's evolution to be the result of its political decisions, since those decisions are limited both by the society's historicity and by class domination. Actionalist sociology ought to occupy a central position in sociological analysis, because it carries sociological method—that is, analysis of conduct by social relations—to its highest level, that of historicity, the level of society's work upon itself. But those entering upon this path must always be aware of how inadequate their knowledge is bound to be in relation to the difficulty of the task they are taking on. Perhaps 1 should reiterate that the central importance 1 give to the concept of historicity has nothing to do with any vague exhortation to "see social facts in relation to history." Nothing could be more innocent, on the surface, than such friendly reminders about the usefulness of situating observed phenomena in time and space, of examining their development, of taking account of their particularities. Is not sociology's number one sin sociocentrism, we are often asked, when a little historical and geographical awareness could safeguard it so easily against anachronisms and errors of interpretation? Such admonitions are indeed apposite when it is a matter of analyzing a historical situation; but too often, beneath a thin layer of "good sense," they conceal what is in fact an outright rejection of sociological analysis, or recourse to a historicism that sociology has always had to fight against, and to which the concept of historicity is intended to deliver the last and fatal blow. Sociology's object is never a concrete historical whole; even if one carries one's analysis to the furthest limits or macrosociology, as I myself am doing, what is involved is always analysis of social mechanisms and relations, mechanisms and relations that must be isolated from the historical settings in which they were first observed. If we look for the meaning of social conduct in the evolution of societies or in that of any one of their particular aspects—their techniques or their values for example—then we are falling into historicism, in other words, on the far side of an absolute relativism that destroys all possibility of knowledge, into the ideathat through history there is being manifested, being realized, a meaning, a human nature, or a natural and stable type of social organization. 1 must sayit again: the principal reason for the concept of historicity is to eliminate all historicist recourse to^sejices, that last avatar of the metasocial warrants of social order. It is time to recognize that it is in the mode of sociology that our societies must now know themselves, by apprehending themselves as systems and no longer as evolutions. Those we call historians have contributed to the effecting of this change no less than those we call sociologists.
32
Chapter One
C.
The Cardinal Points of Sociology
a.
Functions, Controls, Decisions, Actions
The study of society is confronted from the outset by certain choices that orient it, that determine the division, if not into schools, then at least into orientations various enough to force us into redefining general sociology as an analysis of the relations among these diverse orientations. It is therefore desirable that the present sociological inquiry, like any other, should be aware of the starting point it adopts, even though it may subsequently strive to achieve freedom from it. These general orientations are defined by the preference given to one of the two possible replies to each of the two questions that the sociologist encounters from the very start. A unit termed ''society" must possess an organization, a continuity, and therefore mechanisms for the maintenance and transmission of orientations, norms, or power. But it is also the producer of its history and must possess means of adapting itself to the modifications of its environment or of acting upon its own transformation. The sociologist thus faces a first choice: he will be asking questions either about the problems of society's production or about those of its reproduction, either about order or about movement. Second, a society is a unity, an actor, determining its internal functioning and its relations with the outside; but it is also the locus of social relations that may appear to be more fundamental than values, norms, or mechanisms of socialization. The sociologist must necessarily give priority either to the unity of societal action or to social relations, and above all to relations of domination. He conceives society either as a field of decisions oriented by objectives, adapted to the environment, or on the other hand as a field of social relations, of conflicts, of ideologies, and consequently places more emphasis on what it excludes, represses, or manipulates. A sociological school or orientation is defined by the intersecting of these two choices. It is not necessary to suppose that every sociologist consciously decides to adopt one of the four cardinal points thus defined as his particular starting point. But these four points nevertheless make it possible to situate the branches of sociological thought in relation to one another and consequently to make them more aware of the choices—often implicit—that they make, and the limitations to which they are subjected. Let us quickly summarize these four fundamental orientations. 1. A sociology of order that gives priority to society's relations with its environment will define the Junctions that must be organized within it. Society must feed itself, defend itself, reproduce itself, ensure its stability and its continuity.
Historicity
33
2. On the other hand, a sociology of order more aware of internal social relations sees order as containing a domination exercised by some and imposed on all. Here the concern is no longer with functions but with controls, with an apparatus of repression and social and cultural integration, functioning in the service of a power. 3. The sociology of movement, when it examines the problems involved in a social unit's adaptation to a changing environment, gives greatest importance to the decisions by means of which an actor responds in a coherent manner to the stimuli of that environment. 4. Last, a sociology of movement that gives the greatest importance to the oppositions and conflict within society may be termed a sociology of action. Movement is not a decision taken by a "government" within the society; it is the result of social relations that are never fully institutionalized and that express the constant opposition between rulers and ruled, an opposition linked with accumulation and with the concentration of the power of decision. Sociological endeavors, in their essence, can thus be divided into four domains studying functions, controls, decisions, and actions (see fig. 1). order interactions of society with environment
internal social relations
functions
movement decisions
controls
Figure 1
Each of the rows and columns is associated with certain attitudes that are not purely scientific. And this explains why a certain aspect of sociological analysis will be given preference by a certain society, social group, or individual. At the risk of painting in over-bold colors, these various images of the sociologist must be roughed in. Those situated on the upper line are more "optimistic." They also pay more attention to what takes place at the "top" of society. They are more interested in the legislator, in the government, in the managing director, than in prisoners, minorities, or wage earners. The
34
Chapter One
others tend to look more for the hidden forces within society, are mistrustful of its discourse and rationality in which they think they detect the dominion of an ideology, a mixture of integration and repression. The order column contains those who are sensitive primarily to social continuity, those who see in today the weight of the past, of its values or its heritage. In the movement column, on the other hand, it is the future that seems to govern the present, and the resulting analysis lays stress on new trends, forces, and conflicts. But we can go even further in the political localization of sociology's main themes. The problems I have presented in a general form, attributing them to society in general, also correspond more directly to the preoccupations of opposing social classes. The ruling class, steward of social order, concerned with ensuring the transmission of its own privileges and of social inequality, is more responsive to the theme of functions because it is more interested in maintaining the established order than in questioning its values and its power. Whereas a working class chafing at the barriers raised in the domain of consumption, education, etc., by the ruling class, and aiming at seizing or sharing its power, will clearly be more responsive to any criticism of the ruling class and of existing mechanisms for the reproduction of inequalities. Inversely, it is a new ruling class that analyzes society most directly in terms of decision making. It is much less interested than an old ruling class in the values and principles to be defended; much more interested than an old ruling class in the efficacy of a strategy that will enable it to control society's transformation. As its principal adversary it finds new forces of opposition, concentrating on new problems and new social conflicts, in revolt against the ruling ideology and filled with passionate enthusiasm by the creation of a collective protest action. The study of Junctions examines social roles, the conduct of the actor legitimately expected by his partner in a specific social activity. The role/expectation-of role dyad is a transcription in terms of social interaction of a norm, and thus an element of order. This functionalists moves away from the domain of sociology if it replaces these networks of relations with conformity or nonconformity to principles, to values, to essences embodied in a sovereign. The study of decisions devotes itself to relations of influence, to the actor's comparative capacity to modify the behavior of his partner or to be modified by him as to his own behavior. It moves away from the field of sociology when the actors do not seem to belong to the same social whole, when their strategies can thus be analyzed in terms of "game theory,'* a situation met with in varying degrees in the whole study of intersocial relations and, more particularly, international ones. The study of actions is sociological insofar as it examines structural
Historicity
35
conflicts and above all class conflicts, conflicts over the control and appropriation of society's capacity to transform itself by its work; it ceases to be sociological either if it sets up human values or a human nature in opposition to social domination, or if it conceives of this conflict as escaping from the order of social relations and as being, for example, purely economic. The study of controls highlights alienation, the contradiction between the dominated actor's conduct corresponding to his situation and the conduct imposed upon him by institutions and socialization in the service of the ruling order. It moves away from the domain of sociology if its fails to recognize the existence of anything other than that order, which it thus supposes to be closed, or of that domination, which it supposes total, and recognizes no other social dynamic than in the dissociation of that internal order and the demands of the environment. My classification here is of themes, not of works. The sociologist who could be fitted precisely into any one square of this tabulation would be better defined by an ideological label than by a sociological school. In reality, all sociological thought of any importance represents an effort to integrate a variety of themes, to escape from one ideological vision by replacing the theme it gives priority to into a more general analysis. It would be just as false to believe that the sociologist can evade the choices indicated here with an appeal to * 'objectivity'' as to enclose him rigidly inside one ideological school. But no progress can be made toward a specifically sociological analysis, defined by its coherence and by the interests it represents, except insofar as we recognize that each and every one of us comes^U^jiowlejjgepf society through a particular door, a door conditioned by our specific social situation, our political choices, our life stories. Everyone must know at the outset where and what his first base is. What makes it possible to transcend the limitations from which we start is first and foremost a recognition of the unity of sociological reasoning. In other terms, what imprisons sociology within ideology is the refusal to recognize the specificity of a sociological point of view. This pons asinorum can be defined very simply. The specific task of sociology is to explain social conduct by the nature of the social interactions of which that conduct is one of the terms. Each of our four principal themes leads to sociology because it is studying a type of social interaction. It departs from sociology if it is a pretext for turning to other types of reasoning. 1 shall attempt in this book, like most sociologists, to emerge from one of my "boxes" of sociological analysis with the aim of formulating the elements of a general procedural method. But 1 must start by indicating the cardinal point toward which my face is turned as I stand on the starting line.
36
Chapter One
Itis actionalist sociology that seems to me to be the best point of departure and to provide the most central contribution to general sociologyThis advantage is connected first with the particular features of the most highly industrialized societies. Almost everything in them occurs as the result of decisions or social relations. It is difficult to see how the knowledge of societies undergoing rapid change could assign a central place to an analysis of principles, of values, and of their transmission, since these are things that conjure up societies with a very slow rate of change rather than industrial or postindustrial societies. This observation clearly favors both the sociology of decisions and that of action. One can in fact view these two as inseparable; each is the others "secret enemy." But the sociology of decisions necessarily identifies itself with the ruling c/uss\ it does so by refusing to look beyond political mechanisms, by refusing to recognize the existence of class relations and a system of domination, by imposing an image of social conduct as self-interested calculation and strategies favoring the decision makers, by turning away from whatever the social order rejects and excludes, by denying the existence of social movements. Actionalist sociology alone places itself directly on the level of social relations, upstream from that of political decisions, and is thus just as aware of what is excluded as of what is effected, of what is dominated as of what dominates. Actionalist sociology is most directly opposed to the sociology of functions. Nothing could seem further from an analysis of society as an actor guided by values and norms, establishing and controlling his inner order and his relations with the environment, than the analysis of action and the conflicts by means of which society acts upon itself in order to lift itself outside its functioning, toward a beyond in the present, toward objectives that can be cither inside history or outside it. Actionalist sociology is close to a sociology of controls, since the latter criticizes the sociology of functions by recognizing the power behind the rules and the inequality behind the differentiation. But it stands apart from it insofar as it apprehends the present as being more directly governed by the future or the beyond than it is by the past. Actionalist sociology is thus the furthest removed from being a description of the social order, from identifying itself with the discourse of society itself whereas the sociology of functions is the nearest to that discourse and most easily confuses sociological analysis with a reconstitution of the image a society forms of itself through its institutions and its dominant ideology. All of which should give the sociology of action the motive role in the construction of sociological analysis. The sociology of controls teaches how to unmask the social order; the study of decisions throws sociology into the vanguard. Actionalist sociology could link these two kinds of progress and
Historicity
37
construct a critical sociology of the production of society by itself, at the opposite pole to the positivist analysis of society's consumption of itself by its members which defines a functionalist sociology. But by its very role, actionalist sociology is exposed to greater dangers than are the other currents of sociological analysis. Any critical sociology is in danger of becoming the prisoner of the ideology opposing the ascendancy of the dominant one, since the latter has the advantage of greater instrumentality, of possessing the "realism'' of any actor actually managing a social whole. The critical sociology runs this risk more directly than a sociology of controls, which is applying its criticism to observation of a consolidated established order. Actionalist sociology, on the contrary, is nearer to the actors and their relations, more tempted in consequence by the dangers of a historicist analysis of the praxis and, more simply, by those of an epic philosophy of history. As a result, the theoretical advantages that I attribute to the procedure or approach 1 am going to expound are never separable from the practical obstacles it encounters. The closer one approaches to action, the more one risks being more rejected, more deceived, and more manipulated by the actors themselves; and the more too one is tempted to confuse the meaning ot the action and the consciousness of the actor. Which is why the actionalist sociology came late into the field, embarrassed by its very ambitions and by the resistance it is doomed stir up. At least it is useful to sociology as a whole to hear the objectives that this approach assigns itself, the concepts it employs, and the social phenomena to which it gives form and visibility through its analysis. One can accept that certain kinds of research are not conscious of the theoretical orientations on which they are based. But sociology is too closely involved in the world of opinions and ideologies easily to dispense with the constant effort to define its approaches and criticize its own limitations. b.
From Functionalist Sociology to Actionalist Sociology
The formation of sociology has accompanied the development of Western societies during the course of their industrialization. Because that industrialization was dominated at first by a capitalist bourgeoisie whose economic achievement turned society topsy-turvy, but whose action was subjected to almost no social and political control, those who defined themselves as sociologists were often^reoccupied firsthand foremost with the reestablishment of a certain social integration^ and thus of a social control over economic activities. If economic analysis could throw light on the movement of society, was it not the task of sociology to discover the necessary conditions of order? The question that haunted, and which still haunts, what we might call classical sociology is this: On what conditions, through all its transfor-
38
Chapter One
mations and struggles of interests, does a society maintain the unity that enables it to define laws, make its institutions work, form new generations, and manage its internal conflicts? In Western Europe, this line of questioning developed along with a progressive institutionalization of labor conflicts. The action of trades unions, the introduction of social laws and labor codes helped reintroduce the idea of solidarity to which Durkheim gave an importance that has been shown to be durable. In the United States, a nation formed by the more or less complete integration of successive waves of immigrants, and one that succeeded in riding its greatest crisis, the unity of society—supported in this instance by the tremendous development of its judicial and political institutions—appeared to many as the extraordinary fact whose explanation must give sociological thought its direction. In Soviet society, and in countries whose development is controlled by a communist party, it is, rather, the force of an ideological and political system that imposes itself first on the observer and that places the themes of integration, of participation, of citizen training in the forefront. No sociologist thinks that this order and this integration presuppose a perfect agreement between all the parts; conflicts of interest must still exist, insofar as social roles are differentiated and a hierarchyexists. But classical sociology considers that such conflicts occur within institutional mechanisms which themselves rest upon a body of values and norms. The historic conditions of sociology's formation thus explain why it has more often than not viewed society as an actor exercising a certain control over its activities and organization, defining rights and duties, forms of authority and organization. This social and intellectual tradition has contributed a great deal to our knowledge of society. But that contribution cannot be isolated and assessed except at the price of a critical analysis, an analysis that will reveal not only how classical sociological thought belongs to a particular, historically defined cultural field, but also its political role. Parallel to this, the critique we need to make of it is governed by a change in the position of the sociologist himself, and by a change in the political situation. Just as classical sociology developed alongside the progressive institutionalization of the conflicts produced by capitalist industrialization, so any critique of it is inseparable from the appearance of new social rifts, new problems, new social movements. This renewal of_sociology has two main aspects: first, the increased extent of the area covered by sociological thought, and more broadly by political 4l events." Sociology, like history, confined itself for decades to study of the more "advanced" societies. We are still far too inclined to call someone who studies Africa an Africanist and someone who studies Europe or North America a sociologist. But it is impossible today to go on viewing societies as
Historicity
39
more or less developed, situated neatly inside various stages of growth. They are not like horses in a race, running faster or slower, starting before or after each other. They cannot be understood without some consideration of the relations of domination and dependence that unite them, or without consideration of the movements of transformation and liberation that are animating the dominated peoples. Second, within the dominant and rich societies themselves, progress in the institutionalization of certain conflicts is being accompanied by new rifts, by problems and movements that are still "savage/* "uncivilized." We are seeing the formation of new conflicts even more than the institutional accommodation of old ones. Rejections and rebellions breed and increase, forcing us to question ourselves about society with respect not to its functioning and integration but to its orientations and conflicts. Sociology must pay particular attention to the new forms of power and conflict appearing before its very eyes. As it progressively learns to recognize the new forms of society's action upon itself—the creation of a programmed society, the industrialization of consumption and information, the extension of the field of social conflicts, the programs of accelerated development and revolutionary transformation of huge nations—sociology must begin to question its classical approach, which consisted in placing the observer in front of a society conceived of as a constituted totality, a monument of culture. Whether we look upon the national "reality" as fundamental, and the nation therefore as a personage, whether we attach more importance to the juridical rules that organize social life and to the moral principles behind them, and lastly, whether we are looking for economic systems behind political or cultural unities, we are inclined tci^see society as an entity, because our most usual experience is that neither we ourselves individually, nor the groups of which we are a part, have the capacity to change the rules of the social game, the conditions of economic life, or the cultural conventions. This type of representation is not favorable to sociology in principle. In order to indicate the distance that separates society from the actors living in it, it tends to resort to a historical, juridical, or economic explanation of social facts./What we might call classical or functionalist sociology has nevertheless helped to maintain this kind of approach while introducing into it the more elementary requirements of sociological analysis. It has claimed the right, with Durkheim, to explain the social by nothing other than the social. But it has also, and as a consequence, presented society as a system organized around its values and its needs for integration, for conflict management, or for adaptation to internal or external changes.
40
Chapter One
It is this image of society as actor, as sovereign, taking advice and meting out justice, uttering the law and making war, educating its children and punishing deviants, that we must eliminate once and for all. We must overthrow the old conception of society, which society itself is unable to make use of, in its practice, other than as an ideological holding operation. I shall indicate here three important aspects of this functionalist representation that I believe must be urgently eliminated from sociologists' thought. 1. The notion to which classical sociology always returns is that of values. But all forms of research into social interactions lead us away from values. Must 1 recall that political sociology and organizations theory have shown us that decision systems—at least in our type of society—are not the application of principles but the result of transactions, a fact that recognizes a certain heterogeneity of the interests confronting one another? It is of strategies and interests that we ought to speak in this area, not of values. If we consider the functioning of organizations themselves, this observation is even more self-evident; conduct is oriented within them both by technical constraints and by relations of power or, more generally, by social relations. The nearer one approaches concrete social experience, the more the apparent unity of values explodes: on the one hand a society's instrumentality, in other words the internal characteristics of its productive forces, on the other, the social and political relations that orient the system of production and the management of society. Which is why we cannot say that authority in the state and in the modern firm is functional, rational-legal, which is to say, in Weber^s sense, bureaucratic. We need only consult the observations of the sociology of work to see immediately that rationalization is in no way separable from a social power whose intervention manifests itself in relations of authority that are neither entirely rational nor entirely legal. The notion of bureaucratic authority masks the gap and sometimes the contradiction that exists between a technique and a power. The notion involved is an ideological one. It is not merely isolating a certain order of phenomena within the field of observation, which would be legitimate; it is substituting the unity of a discourse for a set of relations, tensions, and contradictions. Organizational sociology did not achieve any decisive progress until it had rid itself of this type of discourse. What then is a society's system of values? On the highest level it is the unity of a discourse held by the ruling classes or by the ruling political forces of a society, a discourse whose function is to identify forms of social organization with technical activity, by combining both within the notion of values. Social power presents itself then as the spirit or soul of society, and claims that all social conflicts are played out within a general consensus.
Historicity
41
The system of values is nothing other than a more or less coherent ideology, always bound up with social categories possessing a certain power, which is to say the capability of defining the activities and gratifications of society's members as a whole in terms of their own objectives and representations. But this ideology does not completely determine the categories of social practice. It exercises a dominion over what may be termed society's discourse; it does not provide an account of all its aspects. For that discourse is also a debate and a discussion; the voice of the popular classes can be heard in them, however faintly, as can that of interest groups with access to the political system, that of the "professionals" who are creating a rhetoric rather than an ideology, and so on. It is essential to recognize that social practice as a whole—even when isolated from the complexity of a social formation—forms an uncontrolled, unintegrated whole, and thus represents the relations of the classes, struggles for political influence, and all other types of social interactions, despite the effort at unification maintained in the name of values, principles, or traditions, by the ruling class and its ideologists. For a system of values unifying social practice to exist it is necessary that society should be totally dominated, politically and culturally, by a sovereign, whether it be Capital or Central Committee. 2. It is also an ideological operation that makes possible the assertion that a society is governed by a coherent body of values. Are the industrialized societies universalist while the rest are particularist? A totally arbitrary assertion. Nationalisms are indeed broader particularisms than those restricted in number and extent by attachment to a community; does this mean they are a form of universalism? The ethnocentrism here is self-evident, leading to an opposition of traditional and modern societies as though the former were "inferior" to the latter. It could be shown, taking each of the pattern-variables Talcott Parson defines (notably in Toward a General Theory of Action, Harvard University Press, 1951, and in Working Papers in the Theory of Action, Free Press, 1953) that every society experiences conduct both affective and affective-neutral, specific and diffuse, particularist and universalist, instrumental and consummatory, self-oriented and collectivity-oriented. These notions enable one to classify conduct, but they cannot be used to define the totality of a society's cultural orientations, and even less to describe the evolution of societies. A society is not a ship steered by a pilot toward a known destination. 3. This double reduction, of society to a central actor, and of actors' orientations to a unified system of values, leads to a third limitation and
42
Chapter One
distortion of sociological analysis: itrefuses to step outside the area illuniined by the institutions. What is not in conformity with the rules of those institutions is termed disorganization, marginality, deviance, anomie. At no point does it occur to this sociology to topple the official image of society and challenge the established order in the name of all that does not conform to it. Social movements are merely manifestations of some kind of malfunction or unfortunate discrepancy in the social organization. And even Robert Merton, who is much more aware than most of the dangers inherent in an excessively rigid functionalism, in his paradigm of social conduct (Social Theory and Social Structure, Free Press, 1957, pp. 131-94), does not go beyond recognition of discrepancies between acceptance of ends and acceptance of means in a given society, which leaves all conduct that rejects both ends and means, or rather power and organization, in an undetermined no-man's-land. This positivist sociology identifies itself with the rules of social life. Just as knowledge of society was long delayed in France by the authority of the state or church, just as it is practically impossible in dictatorships, can it not also be limited, as in the United States particularly, by the authority of norms less linked to a central power, more interiorized, more moral in their nature, so that more often than not sociology is placing itself inside the established order, or even making its own contribution to the building of the wall that, internally as well as externally, protects the "civilized" against the "savages"? c.
Calculation and Mask
This clear conscience enjoyed by classical sociology is now under attack from two different sides: on the one hand by a sociology more responsive to social change and the mechanisms of decision making that orient it; on the other, by a critical sociology that draws attention to the presence in the social order of a construction serving the purposes not of values but of the dominant class. 1 am returning here, having dealt with a sociology of values, to the role played by a sociology of decisions and a sociology of controls. What 1 am trying to do is to follow with greater precision the path leading from classical sociology to actionalist sociology via the two other currents of sociology whose positive contributions and inadequacies must both be pointed out. 1. In his early work, such as the Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim (as A. Pizzorno has pointed out in his "Lecture actuelle de Durkheim" in Archives europe'ennes de sociologie, 1963, pp. 1-36) is at times near to a line of thought, more strongly developed by English radicalism, that has today rediscovered a great vitality. According to this line of thought, social orderjs^ not achieved by integration into a system of values but by the efficient
Historicity
43
functioning of representative institutions: they make it possible to eliminate the 4tpathological forms" of the division of labor. Society is not oriented by values; nor even by the requirements of its own integration; it evolves pragmatically, in terms of negotiations and transactions established between various group interests. Political and social laws, collective c^mtracts and agreements define limited and temporary equilibria, and ensure the best adaptation possible of the society to the constant changes of the environment. It is useless and even dangerous to appeal to values, to principles that manifest both rejection of change and the maintenance of one type or another of absolutism. The idealism of values must be replaced by a pragmatic rationalism. This is a lib era/ vision, whose principal merit is that of being a doctrine of change But which seems to me to confuse two orders of phenomena that ought to be kept distinct. The fact that in certain modern societies the field of negotiations and representative institutions is widening does not permit us to conclude that a society is a political market, that power is no more than influence, and that no structural limits exist to negotiations and to the pressures exercised by group interests. The state of a society is not entirely the result of its decisions; all claims are not negotiable; beyond the political processes, and acting as limits to them, there exist both orientations defining a cultural and social field which is qualitatively different from all others, and also relations of domination and power. There is no society that is not like an iceberg; the visible part, that of awareness, of decisions, of transactions, is smaller than the invisible part, that of the impossible, of the forbidden, of repression, of domination. No mechanism of planning, of conscious harmonization, of transaction can integrate all the conflicts into a whole. Analysis centered on integratipn reduces society to its forms of socia[ organization, of division of labor, and simultaneously transforms differentiation, specialization, and hierarchization into an order that can have no meaning other than the determined maintenance of the established order, masking the reality of jpower, of inequality, of repression. A purely "political" sociology on the other hand, centered on the study of negotiations and decisions, dissolves social structure in social change, thus affirming continuity within change and deliberately neglecting the qualitative jumps that must occur, in one form or another, in the course of any long-term change process. This "political" sociology marks an important advance on functionalist sociology. Because it investigates societies that are in a process of rapid change, which they are attempting to harness, it is no longer directed like the classical school toward research into the conditions of an order that it might still be able to recapture, despite the upheavals of capitalist industriali-
44
Chapter One
zation. It no longer conceives of society as based upon principles and upon agencies that teach those principles and cause them to be respected; it defines it in terms of its operations and thus follows a method of permitting a direct analysis of the mechanisms of society's functioning. In practice, however, it replaces the appeal to values and social integration with identification with the riders and their representation of society. Already in the nineteenth century the liberal ideologists were wanting all workers to behave like entrepreneurs, seeking their own profits, taking risks and initiatives, conforming with economic rationality, which came to the same thing as denying the relations of domination exercised by the entrepreneur over the wage earner. Today, in the same way, by centering attention on decision making, one inevitably sets up an opposition between those capable of making decisions, choices, deliberations, negotiations, and those who are tradition-bound, rigid, encumbered by habits and principles and can appear only as a mass that must have an elite to lead them toward change. This sociology reduces the functioning of society to the interaction of actors, in much the same way as historical studies have gone on for so long telling us about its kings and captains, its saints and heroes, leaving the vast "inactive" multitude in the shadow. 2. Diametrically, and usefully, opposed to this interactionism we find the critical sociology of social controls, which sees in the categories of social practice not the formal expression of values and norms but the maintenance of inequalities and of power. This sociology, faithful to the Marxist critique of the "fetishism*' of economic categories, recognizes in those domains apparently the furthest removed from social domination and production the stamp of the dominant ideology and its work of legitimizing existing inequalities and privileges. This is an indispensable method of procedure without which presociological notions inevitably creep back: appeals to the "natural" differences between men, to the "natural" criteria of development or payment, to the independence of cultural facts in relation to the social "frameworks" into which they are inserted, and so on. But can we remain content with seeing society simply as a system of domination without finding ourselves caught once more between two equally deplorable solutions? The first consists in appealing against all that is institutionalized and organized to a human nature that reveals itself solely in spontaneity and constant transcendence of the established order. This is an idea always ready to surface in a sociology of which it in fact constitutes the negation: social organization, being nothing other than the product of power and ifs
Historicity
45
ideology, can be destroyed by rebellion, thus making it possible to return to or to achieve a society in which exchange would be replaced by use, the instituted by the instituting, the pursuit of the signs of wealth and status by the satisfaction of man's basic needs. No matter what the tone in which these themes are presented, they are never expressing anything but nostalgia for a social philosophy whose splendor cannot conceal the fact that it is the very thing sociology must transcend in order to exist. The second solution leads back to the functionalism one had supposed defeated. This sociological school, which talks about domination, could more simply use the term stratification. Why accuse a ruling class's ideology, it asks, when all that is needed is to recognize the dominion of values and norms? That differentiation and hierarchization exist in all domains of social organization has never been denied by anyone; why conclude from an observation of their presence that society is ruled by a single class, about which everyone constantly talks without ever defining it in terms of its decisions, its interests, its productive role? Just as the sociology of decisions dissolves the system in the actors and their relations, the sociology of controls dissolves the actors in the system, which can be acceptable, if it is solely a matter of understanding how a system maintains itself, but which ceases to be so if one is trying to explain its nature and its reason for being, how it is produced and how it operates. d.
Toward an Actionalist Sociology
In conclusion, we must recognize that it is much more difficult to find a way out of functionalist sociology—without leaving sociology altogether—than is supposed by all those who raise such a hue and cry against it. Which leads us to take another look at our outline of the main currents of sociological analysis given earlier in this chapter. The sociology of decisions and the sociology of controls are less orien- \ tations of sociology comparable with a functionalist or actionalist sociology y) than islands in the middle of the river that flows between the other two. At every moment sociology has to make a choice between what one might term a sociology of collective consciousness, which is first and foremost a sociology of order and its maintenance, and an actionalist sociology, which is also that of historicity and social relations. The sociology of decisions is already a sociology of action, but it is still a sociology of order in that it recognizes the open market as the best of all possible worlds and defines social actors according to their place within the social organization instead of trying to find out how the latter was produced by the relations between the actors. The sociology of controls seems to break with the clear conscience of
^ .
f r
46
Chapter One
classical sociology, but is no more than the opposition of His Functionalist Majesty, depriving itself of every possible means of understanding the production of the social order. However, both these sociologies, by their very opposition, pose an insoluble problem to functionalist sociology. For the latter, actor and system are inseparable. The actor plays a role defined by the system's norms and values. The sociology of controls tells us that actors do not play the role they think they are playing, that the actors are masked, the dice loaded, the social order a comedy that always ends in trickery. The sociology of decisions also shatters the classical image of the system; it replaces the absolute by the relative, the immutable by change, values by transactions. How are we to provide a simultaneous account of these images of social life: on the one hand, a society that produces itself through its changes and its decisions, empirically, and under the guidance of a ruling elite; on the other, a social order that is the concealing mask of a systematic domination and its accompanying repression? We are bound to advance, in conjunction, two apparently contradictory propositions: ( D a society is a whole defined and delimited by certain social and cultural orientations that are not the property of one category of actors but the field of social relations, and (2) a society is a whole, composed of social relations, and is produced by the actors through their forms of conflict and cooperation. These two propositions are only compatible if, instead of conceiving of society as an order, we recognize that it is defined by its historicity and hot by its functioning, by its capacity to produce itself and not by its organs of reproduction. For this first step makes it possible to dissociate the orientations of historicity from the values of the social order and to drive class relations and domination between them like a wedge. This is why the sociology of values must be rejected as forcefully as possible. The weakness of the sociology of decisions and the sociology of controls is that they do not question this image of society as a functional system, market or ideology, ' held over from functionalist thought. Historicity is not a set of values, for it defines orientations that are not put to work and do not become socially functional except via the relations between the classes struggling for control of them. Society is neither pure class domination nor an order wholly in the service of values. On that doubly negative assertion and the positive propositions it ! implies, the whole of this book is built. Social practice always refers simultaneously to class domination and the orientations of historicity. The sociology of decisions must suppress the system in order to understand the
Historicity
47
actors; the sociology of controls must suppress the actors in order to display the system. But the first reintroduces the system by identifying it with the | interests of the elite, and the second leads us back to functionalist analysis of \ the system by its inability to analyze class relations. Let us end this dilemma: 1 historicity is the stake of class relations; it does not govern social organization ' without being stamped with the dominion of the dominant class; but the dominated are not reduced to mere extras in a performance put on by the ruling class. There are enough exclusions, interdicts, and repressions, but enough rifts also, enough debates and social movements, for us to discern easily enough, behind the established order and its reproduction, the class struggles through which historicity is transformed into social organization. And immediately we find that the opposition set up between a sociology of order and a sociology of movment has been transcended. The sociology of movement, isolated from that of order, leads back to a sociology of decisions, while the sociology of controls is enclosed within the social order. Historicity is not pure movement; it is not a force of change but a constitution of a field of colfective experience. Likewise, the action of each class is not a simple will toward change but a struggle against a certain order. The very nature of industrialized societies, as of all societies engaged in a conscious effort of development, purges social analysis of all recourse J o essences, to values. The error would be to believe that this disappearance of the social order's metasocial warrants must lead to a conception of society as a simple network of decisions, changes, or operations aimed at the maintenance and reproduction of order. Society must indeed be conceived of as a system, but one whose specificity is that of being capable of historicity, of the production of its own condition of functioning on the basis of orientations, creating a model of knowledge, of accumulation, and of prehension of creativity. Such is the central idea of the sociology I term actionalist: society is not reducible to its functioning or to its adaptation to an environment; it produces itself, so that there exists a fundamental tension between a society's historicity and the functioning or reproduction of a collectivity, of a "social formation." which manifests historicity but which is also a particular historical unity and a social organization functioning in accordance with the norms and requirements of an internal coherence. I am not certain that my placing a sociology of historical action in relation to other currents of sociological analysis defines it any more clearly. Some may even be irritated by an approach that seems to be putting all the others in their places while presenting itself as an ultimate synthesis. I hope no one will construe the spirit in which these pages have been written as one of conquest. I am simply trying to define an approach and to show that it corresponds to what is most specific in sociological analysis. But
48
Chapter One
what may constitute its interest certainly constitutes its weakness. Ultimately there would be some justice in answering that this actionalist sociology of mine has no proper content of its own, that by dint of transcending all the others it has reduced itself to existing in those undefined no-man's-lands that serve to separate other particular but well-founded modes of analysis one from another. Without being as pessimistic as that, I do recognize that it is more reasonable to look at how the parts of a society—or the parts of a discourse—fit together than to seek out behind the established order this interdependence of tensions and conflict by which I define the self-production of society. And yet, how can one help saying that it is time now, in a day when the present is controlled more by the future than by the past, to give priority to the way in which a society produces itself rather than to the means by which it reproduces itself; and how, at the same time, can one fail to take a position against a sociology of decisions or of "planning" that is not just a set of often remarkable achievements but above all the ideological weapon of the new ruling class? What I am certainly not trying to do here is to capture the whole of sociology in some imaginary manual, its separate chapters written for the most part by different authors, none of them knowing what the finished work would be, and unintentionally lending their authority to an overall conception to which they do not subscribe. Put much more simply, I am simply saying that when defining a specific procedural approach one must recognize openly that it will conflict with others. Moreover, I hope that my candor will have the double advantage of provoking argument and providing an antidote to the laziness of all those who call themselves sociologists without ever asking themselves what sociology means. D.
The Birth of Sociology
a.
The Invisible Hand Withdraws
Sociology could not come into being until the point at which a society was formed with a cultural model that was entirely ''practical" and excluded all recourse, all upward reference to a transcendent order, to what I have termed metasocial warrants for the social order. The European industrial revolution in the nineteenth century marked a first stage in the appearance of sociology. The world of essences was under attack from society's greatly increased capacity to act upon itself and change itself. But industrial society, as formed then, still does not appear as the actor of its own transformation. It stiH refers upward to free enterprise, to the market and its laws, to an invisible
Historicty
49
hand that recalls a God or a sovereign. And those who denounce the capitalist profit lying behind the market are referring themselves in their turn to labor as creative energy, whose progress enters into contradiction with the domination of the bourgeoisie. Capitalist industrial society saw the birth of economic analysis, but sociology could not come into being until growth appeared as a mobilization of social resources, as a set of decisions and no longer as submission to laws, and until, also, society's control over itself was manifested in the politics of economic and social intervention as well as in the possibility of totalitarian regimes, or again in revolutions capable of overthrowing a society completely. In our own century, sociology can at last assert its existence. Sociology, which begins by constructing the concept of historicity, thereby makes it possible to go beyond historicism. By conceiving the "meaning" of a society as its work on itself, the construction of an experience, actionalist sociology frees itself from all recourse to the meaning of history and continues the great intellectual transformation begun by Marx when he broke with positivism. // refuses to explain the social by the metasocial and refuses also to regard society as a machine defined by the principles of its functioning. Once again, both idealism and naturalism must be avoided. Society cannot be reduced to the interrelation of its elements; but if it acts upon itself by means of knowledge, accumulation, and its cultural model, in a word, by means of its historicity, this is not because it is governed by the designs of providence, by the progress of enlightenment, or by the emergence of the national state, but simply through its own work, its own capacity to construct a "state of nature" and a type of social organization. It is because the industrialized societies today have a theoretically unlimited capacity for transforming themselves, and the possibility of totally destroying themselves, that we can no longer allow priority to a sociology of order. Sociology is no longer organized around values but around social relations; its investigations are concerned less with the laws that control its functioning than with the process of action. But to reduce the industrialized societies to their historicity would be as false as to reduce primitive societies to their functioning. What makes the acceleration in social changes most apparent is the ever more rapid dissolution of what were once termed "institutions." Jurists and administrators must recognize that law is no longer conceived of as the expression of sovereignty and the general interest. Civilizations—and nations too—are discovering that they no longer have a * 'spirit.'' Men are becoming actors, are being wrenched free from the dominion of rules, of imperatives, of customs. What ^disappearing therefore is the image of society as a family house with thick walls, a home where the fire glows in the hearth, lighting up the pictures of ancestors hanging on the walls, in
50
Chapter One
which-a culture and set forms of social relations are handed on from generation unto generation. In place of all the humanisms, we now see emerging an ever-growing historicity in confrontation with man's natural being. We are discovering simultaneously that man is part of nature and that he is different from the rest of living beings. We are lowering the barriers that once separated human thought, animal behavior, and machines; but at the same time we are grasping man's sociogenetic capacity. Nature and antinature. We are both. And rather than throwing our whole weight into one side of the scale or the other it is better to recognize that the essential is the union of these two aspects of the human reality. In this way an image of society is being created different from all those that have gone before, the images that always defined society by its principles, by its essence, or by its place in an evolution seen as a bearer of meaning. Sociology has no need to demand the whole of the social sciences1 territory for itself. It asserts its right only in its dialogue with that grouping of the natural sciences that fall under the heading of anthropology. One can no more identify the two than separate them. Nor can one lose sociology in the model of knowledge that created biology. Or isolate it from that model, since that would be to give comfort to its old idealist forms. Sociology is a science of man, even though it has too often in the past reinforced and justified man's submission to metasocial warrants for the social order. It has looked for the laws to explain social action outside that action; it has subjected human behavior to divine laws, to the laws of princes, to market laws. And in doing so it has jurnejllts back on its principal task: that of refusing to view any social fact as a thing, rejecting the veryjdeajtf social situation, and of revealing, behind practice and behind discourse, the action of society on itself through the creation of a field of historicity and class conflicts. This transformation of sociological analysis comes into conflict with obstacles that are less intellectual than political. The further the capacity for action of the ruling classes extends, the more strongly they impose their ideology, which presents their action as positive and rational, and which consequently identifies and fuses together the direction of social change, the results of political deliberations, social controls as a whole, and the internal coherence of groupings of means. Society is presented as being an enterprise, an organization that is ensuring its own growth by combining mechanisms of adaptation to a changing environment with the maintenance of its own integration. The ruling classes always have a rationalizing and integrating vision of society. Actionalist sociology on the contrary, because it refuses to identify
Historicity
51
society with its rulers, because it recognizes the central role of class conflict, is constantly aware of what social order represses and destroys, as well as of the interference of power in the social organization. Whether they recognize the fact or not, social adversaries are speaking the language of sociology for the first time. The rulers know that their role is no longer that of mastering nature but that of managing organizations, networks of social relations—that the efficiency of the economy depends upon the capacities for foresight, decision, adaptation, and innovation possessed by complex ensembles. The days are over when an organization—factory, office, regiment, university, hospital— was a tool in the hands of a leader and encountered no other (recognized) problem than the resistance of an adversary or raw material. Wc are no longer in the world of engineers and entrepreneurs but in that of managers and technocratsT On the other hand, in the mass of dependents a new awareness of truly social problems is appearing: whether it is a matter of worker migration, relations between the sexes or age groups, the conditions of urban life, the forms of authority and, more widely, of the power to orient and direct change, it isjn sociajjerms more directly than in juridical or economici terms that claims and rejections are expressed. The interest of the ruling class lies in fostering the belief that this change implies an increase in rationality and a growing autonomy of the various problems posed by the difficulties of adapting to a society in a state of rapid change. But it is a poor_answer to this propaganda to imprison oneself in outworn analyses and to believe that social problems are not serious except when they can be reduced to economic interests or to confrontations over the form of institutions. It is in sociological terms, and therefore in terms of social relations and the action society directs upon itself, that the new forms of social domination, of exclusion and repression, of conflicts and social movements, must be understood. The attempt to do so meets with great resistance, however, especially in a country like France, where the features characteristic of industrial or preindustrial societies remain relatively marked, so that it seems audacious to insist on trends and needs not yet experienced by all. But must sociology wait for a type of society to be already on the wane before daring to examine it? b.
Beyond Historicity?
This representation of sociology and the social conditions of its formation does, however, invite one criticism that must be given due consideration. Is it not, despite all its protestations, an extreme form of nineteenth-century historicism? Is it not culturally bound up with the specific experience of
52
Chapter One
societies involved in an exceptional phase of growth? And is it not in consequence already obsolete, now that we stand at the beginning of a post industrial society in which the search for new equilibria has once more become essential, after the upheavals introduced by a phase of economic development that must now decline, since it is threatening the biological conditions necessary for societies to exist at all? Is it not time to recognize that the most advanced countries economically are about to enter into a posthistorical phase? I do not dismiss that hypothesis. It is possible to imagine a new type of society, one preoccupied with its equilibria, with its functioning, its integration, and whose investments would be absorbed by the conditions of survival or "happiness" and no longer by those of growth. Nothing permits us to say that societies will be more and more "historical," and perhaps we are indeed witnessing the end of a long period that has been dominated by accumulation, capital, the book, and what American students have called "the dictatorship of the ego." But this new naturalism, while setting itself up in opposition to the production ethic characteristic of industrial society, remains just as far as that ethic from an acceptable conception of the relations between man and nature. Previous societies have bequeathed to us the image of man dominating and "civilizing" nature. All the metasocial warrants of the social order share in this very general representation: man rules woman, the mind the body, technique habit, the intelligence the emotions, and so on. One could continue the list indefinitely. A spiritual principle is being imposed on the material world, which is the world of disorder, the immediate, the variable. Setting these images in opposition to that of a human society belonging to the natural world, subject to its equilibria and its "laws," means maintaining, indeed reinforcing, the opposition between man and nature. But in this case it is the ecological balance that is good and it is in the human that one must look for the diabolical, for the forces destructive of order. Our entry into postindustrial society, in an environment dominated by complex organizations and technology, ought not to give new life to the Promethean myth of industrial society, and less still replace it with a naturalizing of man. On the contrary, it ought to impress on us the idea that human society, whatever it may be, constructs its own environment, that any environment is technical and cultural, that man is nature, yes, but with his own special characteristics, chief among which is just this capacity to construct his relation with the environment and his social organization instead of merely receiving them. The opposition between spiritualism and naturalism must be replaced by a sociology that is concerned first and foremost with the work of human societies. We ought rather to look upon the new naturalism as the counterpart of the
Historicity
53
ruling class's Utopia. The latter reduces society's orientations to its functioning. The contrary Utopia counters the dominion of the ruling classes with an appeal to identity, to expression, to pleasure. The very opposition of these two representations invites one to view them as an aspect of the class conflict, of the clash between their respective Utopias in a society that devotes a larger part of its product to investment than any other society in history and which, in this sense, is the very furthest from being a consumer society. It is because the new conflicts and the new social movements corresponding to postindustrial society are still not strongly organized that the "naturalist" Utopias are so conspicuous. Was it not the same in the early ^ days of industrial society, when economic liberalism and Utopian socialism confronted one another before the organization of the labor movement, before recognition was given to the importance of the class struggle and the nature of industrial capitalism, beyond "modernization"? The great cultural upheaval that became more visible as soon as it reached the ruling classes marks the exhaustion of industrial society and its replacement not by a society of equilibrium hut by a postindustrial society in which society's capacity for action upon itself is making a new leap forward, and in" which it is learning to define TtselTas a whole!"imposed 1)7Systems and actions. Sociology must certainly criticize itself in order to move beyond the modes of analysis specific to industrial society, but the most important thing isloshout out loud and clear that the pains sociology is suffering from at the moment are not its death throes but its birth pangs. This book is intended to be a critical reflection on the practice of sociology, critical first of all in that it attempts to divert sociological work from outworn or secondary paths in order to steer it toward the essential, and secondly in that it is contesting the dominion of the socially dominant and politically hegemonic forces over sociological knowledge. But these criticisms occur within a defense of sociological knowledge, for societies with a strong^ historicity can and must know themselves and know other societies through the use of sociology. Never has historicity been more the dominant mode of the existence of societies than it is today. Never, in consequence, has a sociology of historical action, of development, of class interaction, been more necessary. E.
From Orientations to Practice
The study of historical action is not all there is to sociology. It is only the first step in the analysis, but one that governs its general direction. We must at the same time follow the movement that leads from a society's historical experjexice to its system of organization and social control, and also constantly remember the presence of historical action and its problems at the functional level of the various aspects of the social organization. Our analysis
54
Chapter One
must therefore be governed by two principles: the differentiation of several levels of analysis within the social reality and the hierarchization cf those, levels. a.
Institutional Processes
If the study of historical action is not in itself the whole of sociology, this is in the first place because it does not examine concrete social wholes. To speak of baronial society as a social and cultural system does not dispense one from examining France or England as kingdoms and from studying the functioning of their institutions within those political units. The second state of sociological analysis, after the study of historical action, is therefore analysis of the institutional system, which may also be called the political system. The new element introduced here is the existence of an organized system of social control. The internal structure of the field of historical action is transformed at this point into a set of social mechanisms by means of which the rules of collective activity are defined. If one puts the body of values and norms that define a culture and a society at the center of one's analysis, institutions emerge as the formal expression of its norms, and sociology must ask itself questions about the spirit of laws and regulations. Inversely, one can defend a purely contractual conception of institutions, presenting them as limited and temporary contracts made between social groups each seeking to maximize its advantages at the lowest cost. In contrast to these two conceptions, the institutional system appears to me to transform historical action and the social conflicts that develop within it into a body of decisions and laws, while at the same time possessing a certain autonomy based both on the non-fit between a field of historicity and a political collectivity and also on that collectivitys internal problems of integration and adaptation. One must conceive institutions here, not as organized social life, but as the mechanisms for arriving at legitimate decisions within a political unity. This is why I overlap the terms institutional and political, thereby indicating that the specific role of the institutional system is to combine the unity of political management and the representation of divergent or conflicting social interests. The institutional or political integration of a society is always limited. First by the domination that sets advance limits on all deliberations and decisions, and second by nonnegotiable protests. The output of the political system is the separation of the legal from the illegal, and thus the maintenance of what is looked upon as order and also the repression of whatever is rejected as outside that order. b.
Social Organization
This definition of the institutional or political system leads to a third level of analysis, that of social organization or, if you prefer, of organizations. This
Historicity
55
deals with groups in which we find, on the one hand, the exercise of an authority that defines rules of conduct and possesses means of ensuring social integration and of sanctioning deviances and, on the other, the application of those orientations of historical action and class relations that characterize the type of society in which the organizations occur. It is essential here not to identify what is a level of analysis with a concrete reality. An industrial enterprise is certainly^ arT b^phTzatTon-, one "witKin which authority is exercised and roles and statuses, mechanisms of reward and punishment are defined. But it can possess an institutional system in which both board and unions enter into negotiation for the taking of certain decisions. And above all the enterprise is an essential element in the historical action of an industrial society; it is the locus within which the forces of production and class relations are developed. Industrial sociology has devoted the greater part of its efforts to studying the relations between these three levels of analysis. Certain demands made by workers relate to the position of individuals or groups within the organizations, while others challenge the political and institutional system of the enterprise itself, and still others are a manifestation of the conflict between classes whose existence and nature cannot be defined except at the level of the field of historicity. This example shows clearly the hierarchy of the levels of analysis, and at the same time their relative autonomy within a single concrete unit of observation. The great interest of research into organizations—whether industrial, administrative, scientific, or some other kind—derives precisely from the fact that it permits a study of the interaction between historicity* the political process, and organizational functioning, both as it concerns the social slfuaTion and the actors. The same type of analysis can be applied to even larger realities than organizations, as for instance to collectivities such as a city or a nation. This plurality of levels of analysis within a single collectivity has two consequences. The first and most obvious is that the totality of social conduct observable in the functioning of the social organization cannot be analyzed exclusively with the aid of concepts devised purely for the study of social organization. Sociological terminology uses the concept of role improperly. It must be recognized that only a limited part of social conduct involves roles. There are no set roles except insofar as the interacting actors accept the norms defining their mode of interaction. Such is the case with the technical division of labor. We talk of a team when this distribution of roles within a group is recognized, accepted, and justified by the positive value accepted as pertaining to the performance of a communal task. The images that spring to mind immediately are those of the surgical or medical team, or again that of a ship's or plane's crew. One might equally think of a school, insofar as it appears as an agency of socialization, which presupposes that the knowledge
56
Chapter One
and attitudes transmitted in the teaching process are accepted by both teachers and pupils as something given. But these examples themselves demonstrate the limitation of this type of reasoning. The roles depend also on some method of assigning them, and on the mode in which authority is exercised. Consequently the type of participation in the decision-making system determines certain attitudes with regard to the roles that cannot themselves be defined in terms of role. The importance of informal organization, which is at the same time marginal to formal organization and against it, shows the reality of this "political" conduct, which is no longer governed by reference to common norms but is in fact an element in the challenging of those norms, by withdrawal, argument and negotiation, or revolt. Deeper still, the members of an organization may challenge its power system. Such is the nature of the class struggle: it manifests within the social organization conflict whose reason for being resides in the field of historicity, and thus at its most ''abstract" level. This leads us directly to the second observation. The social control that is exercised within an organization is not the direct expression of cultural values and social norms but the refraction of class interaction through the institutional system. Power is the crystallization, at the level of organizations, of social interactions whose reason for being resides on previous levels of analysis. It is both an instrument of integration and an instrument of constraint. In consequence, much behavior that appears dysfunctional if one places oneself at the level of the organization itself, acquires a very different meaning if it is linked to political struggles or to changes in a society's historicity and class relations. A strike, or more generally a movement of opposition or protests, disorganizes a collectivity, has an adverse effect on its "normal" working, but can be an important element of historical action or within the political system. Nothing could demonstrate more clearly the autonomy of the levels of analysis than these disparities between the meaning that the same behavior can have at each level. These disparities cannot be overcome by any vague appeal to a general rationality or to a fundamental line of social development. c.
Hierarchization and Autonomy of the Levels of Analysis
Thus the study of social organization always has two aspects. On the one hand it bears on systems of means, on techniques. It examines the interdependence of those means and the mechanisms that regulate equilibria and changes in the working of those systems.
Historicity
57
Consequently it recognizes the existence of social conduct linked to the place the actor occupies within a differentiated and hierarchized organization. Concepts such as anomie, differential receptivity to socialization, relative deprivation, role conflict, latent function, to mention only a few of the most often employed, all belong to this type of analysis and represent the positive aspect of functionalism. On the other hand it must consider the rules of organization and the mechanisms governing its functioning as the expression of political relations inscribed within a social domination. This complementarity of the two viewpoints is already apparent at the level of the political institutions. The latter are at the same time an instrument for the reinforcement of a social domination—which masks the private character of its interests behind the generality and objectivity of laws and constitu lions—and the locus of negotiations and the management of change. They often possess sufficient autonomy for the political forces not to be purely and simply a translation of social interests and for the political system to institutionalize change. This autonomy can become pathological if the political system is no longer interpreting the great social debates and conflicts; it can on the other hand vanish, if the gap between ruling class and political system is replaced by their fusion into the omnipotence of an absolutist state. France is a curious example of a national society that has experienced, and still experiences, a perpetual see-sawing between these two extreme situations, so that its political institutions ha\e the simultaneous appearance of an absurd and irrelevant game, not only to Ihe revolutionary movements but also to those in power, and of being reduced to the apparatus of a state that is reinforcing and hardening the action of a ruling class either too weak or too entangled in a defense of the past to act for itself. At the social organization level this duality is much more marked, since it is that between power and techniques, but it can also happen that it leads either to a dissociation or to a fusion. There is dissociation when bureaucratization appears, which is to say when the internal functioning of an organization is no longeroriented by adaptation to the environment or by the problems and conflicts of historicity. Fusion occurs, on the other hand, when the techniques are merely the mask of ideology and power. This is more likely to happen in organizations responsible for cultural reproduction, and particularly within the educational system. Both institutions and organizations are thus dependent on the field of historicity, which penetrates in this way right down into the social organization. But again, at both the organizational and the institutional level, actions occur intended to isolate these levels from the dominion of historicity, to achieve either a pure adaptation of a political society to its changing
58
Chapter One
environment, or a pure reproduction of the social organization. The functioning of any level of the social reality outside the field of historicity is always subjecTto a tension between the intervention of historicity and. in opposition to it, of social reproduction. d.
Conflictive Creation
The sociology of functions and the sociology of controls are thus warring partners. They both share an emphasis on social integration, one being positivist and accepting the discourse of society about itself, the other being critical and seeing the unity of society not in consensus but in domination. The first ought to be contested the more vigorously, since it ignores the problems of historicity and those of the political system, reducing (hem to the existence of a supposedly coherent and accepted code of conduct. But the second is in danger of leading to an excessively schematic and thus, in its turn, ideological analysis by neglecting the autonomy of techniques ancf, above all, by failing to recognize that these techniques are the projection of historicity itself, of the production of society by knowledge and the cultural model, onto the level of organizations. Society is not closed, is not completely integrated either by values or by power. At the level of organizations themselves, the dialectic of historicity and class conflicts is being pursued in the very praxis of social movements. What determines a concrete society is its field of historicity. Social relations cannot be understood other than within an experience, which is not a point or a segment on a line of development but a whole, qualitatively different from others, just as particular models of knowledge, types of accumulation, and cultural models are different from others. But this whole cannot be identified with a social order except, first, insofar as the ruling class identifies itself entirely with its historicity, in other words is not being opposed by the social movement of a popular class; second, insofar as the political system is reduced to the management of the state apparatus by that ruling class; and last, insofar as the society's instrumentality is entirely reduced to the exercise of power. Totalitarian societies are those that come closest to this image, which has been depicted in tragic terms in works of sociological fiction such as those of Orwell. But it would be just as false to envisage society as an entirely open set of class conflicts, political arguments, and demands, in which social movements representing opposing classes are in constant confrontation or almost equal terms like a power and a counter-power. Social relations are limited, on the one hand, by political calculations and the internal coherence of the technical systems and. on the other, by the logic of a mode of domination that is operating simultaneously on the economic, the political and legal, and the cultural level. This social domination can never be wholly integrating, however. For at
Historicity
59
the same time as it is constructing a social order and trying to insert all the actors into it in a way that will conform to its private interest, it is also excluding, repressing, and, moreover, parleying with rejection or revolt. Society cannot appear open unless, beyond its principles, its rules, and its functions, the sociologist can discover the conduct expressing opposition, defense, and protest that more often manifests itself in an unconscious and nonorganized way than in the form of clearly constituted social movements. The wage earner does not behave solely in accordance with the logic imposed on him by capitalist or technocratic power. He goes slow, he plays truant, he creates an informal organization, he daydreams, he rebels, he forms unions. The organization of labor in its concrete reality is ultimately no more than the direct and "rationalized" expression of employer power. Even the educational system, which is even more directly linked to the dominant ideology, is never reduced to that ideology completely, because it is the vehicle for knowledge, not just values, because it is dependent on a state in which nondoniinant categories exert an influence, because its professional rhetoric remains distinct from the ideology of the ruling class, because the age groups within it put up a resistance to authority and its norms. Order never reigns without limits. Society is always shot through with refusals, revolts, conflicts; it is constantly being challenged and contestation is constantly being repressed, which is sufficient to indicate the inadequacy of all conceptions of society either as a machine made up of interdependent parts or as an ideological construction. Every society is dominated by an order that is that of the ruling class, but the dominion of that order is limited by historicity itself, by political institutions, and by technical necessities. And the dominated class always makes use of these three checks on power to maintain its resistance and organize its opposition. Actionalist sociology would be dooming itself to destruction if it ceased to recognize the existence both of domination and of its limits and the forms of opposition that those limits make possible. It does not believe that a system of domination cannot be transformed or destroyed except from the outside or by the play of its natural contradictions; nor does it believe that a society's orientations are solely the result of influence, of negotiations, and of a pragmatic adaptation to the changing demands of an environment. It envisages society as a field of conflictive creation. «-—By now it may perhaps be possible to perceive the way in which a sociologyof historicity makes theanalysis of change difficult buf at the same time~ provides the means of linking the study of change with that of social A structure. It makes the analysis of change difficult because it situates'itself synchronistically and refuses to start off from a conception of social evolution. But the sociologist would only imprison himself in the whole he is
60
Chapter One
constructing if he defined it by its functioning. He would then have no other recourse but to explain change by external causes, which comes down either to not giving any explanation at all—since one cannot establish any relation between a modification of the environment and an internal change—or else to adopting a linear vision of evolution in flat contradiction of the viewpoint adopted at the outset. Whereas, on the other hand, the distanc_e_andjion-fit that separate a field of historicity from a social organization and, even more, from the life of a concrete and therefore heterogeneous collectivity, make it possible to introduce an analysis of change that remains dependent on the general conception of social structure it employs. But this theme can only be dealt with after an analysis of the various levels of social reality and also of the forms of social action most directly linked with historicity: class relations and social movements. F.
Actors and Systems
a.
From Actor to Social Interaction
Actionalist sociology asserts that social conduct must be comprehended in its orientations. It rejects all opposition between the^^ fundamental reality of economic relations and representations derived from those relations artificially appearing to govern them. But equally sharply it refuses to accept the setting of social relations as a whole within a framework of systematized values and norms. Historicity is an action of society on itself, but society is not an actor; it has neither values nor power. Values and norms belong to the actors acting within the field of historicity, to the social classes. The underlying movement of these analyses must now be more apparent. From historical action to organization, via the political system, our analysis moves from a society's experience to its internal management, from its practice to its consciousness, from social relations to power, from a society's problems to the solutions it organizes. The analysis does not in any way set out from an absolute principle, from an appeal to liberty and to a subject seeking to transcend its alienations in order to rediscover its unity or to affirm its inexhaustible power of transcendence and negativity. On the contrary, it sets out from work, from the creative activity by means of which a society defines its field by transforming its environment, by constituting a state of nature and a set of cultural and social orientations, in order to arrive eventually at mechanisms of regulation and integration. This sociological analysis is always threatened by doctrinaire reductions. These confuse society with one of its levels or one of its analytic elements. For some, society is reduced to its operational system, and the dynamism of
Historicity
61
historical action is replaced by the supposed existence of a body of values and norms unifying and controlling the whole of social life; constitutes an ideology of the established order. For others, society is nothing more than a political system, a decision-making mechanism, which simultaneously excludes the internal problems of organizations, linked to the interdependence of their elements, as well as the problems of historical action, of its orientations, and of the class relations that express it. Last, there are those for whom society is entirely dynamic. Everything is forces of production, social relations and cultural models, as if the political system and the functioning of the organizations had no coherence of their own, as if all social behavior contributed directly to modifying the historical field, as if society had no inertia. - \ But it would be a poor way of opposing such ideological simplifications merely to content oneself with a pluralism of methods and levels of analysis. The essential J_ask ot sociology is to follow the transition from creation to organization and also to seek out, in various forms of resistance to the constraints and limitations of order, the factors of change and innovation. There exists a hierarchy among the levels of analysis that 1 have distinguished. This does not mean that one is more important than the others or that it isolates determining 4 factors." It is impermissible to say that such and such a category oj socialfacts—the form of production or the "system of ideas"—determines such and such another caiegory of facts, whether it be religious beliefs or economic activity. It must already be clear that one cannot identify a level of analysis and a category of social facts corresponding to a practically defined area of social life. The hierarchy of levels indicates on the contrary that forms of social organization can only be understood by reference to the political decisions of a society, which are limited and oriented by a system of historical action and by a class interaction. — -I The sociology of historicity, because it is a sociology of action, encounters the difficulty specific to all approaches that analyze the meaning of conduct. Is the meaning for the observer not a prisoner of the actors' consciousness? Is the position of the observer not for this very reason dependent upon the position of the actors themselves? This difficulty becomes increasingly obvious as one focuses on the more intentional kinds of social conduct and, above all, on social movements. The labor movement or movements of national independence aim at the attainment of specific objectives, define their own situation, their own nature and that of their opponents. Is not the sociologist reduced to being nothing more than their memorialist or their mouthpiece? Sociology has generally replied to this objection byjayinjj thatjts object is not the acTof buT7K~5ocia7 interaction. The meaning it is analyzing cannot
62
Chapter One
be confused with the consciousness of the actor for the simple reason that it must give an account of the conduct of two or more actors involved i n a social interaction. This reply is the only possible one. And, what is more, it needs to be narrowed down even further, since in this general form it does not definitively dispose of the objection. In practice, the relation between the actors can be conceived of as a reciprocity of consciousnesses. The actors communicate only because they are situated within a set of values and norms that define their respective roles, which is to say the legitimate expectation by each of certain behavior on the part of the other. Interaction presupposes the existence of a higher consciousness, which is no longer that of the particular actors but that of society, a collective consciousness. The sociologist is in that case definitively condemned to be the prisoner of that consciousness. If we add that this collective consciousness can only be the dominant ideology, which is to say that of the dominant class, then the sociologist would be simply expounding and upholding that ideology. He would be no more himself than the ideologist is. And the more he tried to keep aloof from specific interests, the more "objective" he tried to be, the more tied he would be to a defense of established order. Whether one appeals to a collective consciousness or to a dominant ideology, social relations, far from being an analytical tool, no longer appear as anything but the manifestation of an order that is also a supreme actor. The concept of historicity, on the other hand, refuses to define the actors by their interaction and their participation in shared values. It conceives of society as a set of cultural tensions and social conflicts. When one identifies the actor with a role, one is endowing him with a social ego and therefore with rights and duties, with character traits and norms: a good or a bad husband, citizen, or worker. Functionalist sociology, even when it seems at its most abstract, is bourgeois fiction. We must rid ourselves of this conception, one that literature and painting have long since discarded. Analysis cannot depict the actor. It can only take him apart, tear him into pieces, so as to make us perceive social interactions first of all. but also, and more profoundly, the permanent confrontation of desire and language, of historicity and natural laws that structure resources, human and nonhuman, that control and make use of the orientations of historical action. An actor never corresponds directly and entirely to a component of historicity or to any one of the social or cultural orientations that leave their mark upon historicity's dominion over social practice. Even a ruling class is not identifiable with a cultural model or a type of accumulation. The relations between the actors are relations neither of participation in common values nor of pure contradiction of interests; every
Historicity
,-
63
social relation brings together actors who share the same sociocultural experience, who participate in the same historicity, and who are vying for control of it. The actors are constantly see-sawing between that community and that conflict, as they are also between society's functioning and its historicity. The actor is always ambiguous in his relation to the orientation of historical action, and consequently in his conduct at all levels of social reality. The sociologist's analysis is not possible except insofar as the actors interacting with one another are kept apart by misunderstanding, alienation, and conflict, and also insofar as they are unable to make conscious contact, insofar as empathy does not exist. The meaning of a situtation cannot be understood except through the relation of actors in opposition. It is because society does not coincide with its functioning, because it is in tension wftli itself and in disequilibrium, that sociology must always be critical, for the actor is defined by it solely as mediator between opposing orientations, so that one must stand outside that actor, place oneself directly at the level of the networks of social relations in order to understand the social mechanisms involved, the observed forms of society's intervention in itself. -¥• Because it always explains social conduct by social relations, sociology cannot make any use of the traditional opposition between subjective and objective. The_actor_is_jiot explained by the situation, for the situation is itself social relations and action of society on itself. Historicity is neither a state of the forces of production nor a society's project or system of values. It is society's work on itself, and therefore its "technical" aspect—model of knowledge—is not separable from an economic relation—accumulation—or from a cultural model that some would be tempted to classify under ideology. Can one speak of action while separating situation from the meaning of conduct? b.
The Actor Protests.
To gain acceptance for these general principles is difficult only because they grate on the social actors themselves, centered as they are on their intentions, their objectives, and their ideologies, and therefore bound, to the degree in which they exercise authority, or influence, or power, to oppose an analysis that questions the image they create of themselves. This is why sociqlogyjs inevitably against power, for the simple reason that power is inevitably against it. On the other hand, sociology benefits from struggles for power; it thrives oest away from very strongly organized social actors; it is associated with freedom, perhaps more than any other domain of knowledge in our day, as is dramatically shown by the persecutions it has undergone and is still undergoing under the totalitarian regimes. The resistance the sociologist encounters is increased by the fact that he is, more often than not, studying his own society: the validation of his analysis
64
Chapter One
can never be provided by the agreement of the interested actors. The_ meaning he establishes _can_never satisfy the minds of his actors. He would like those actors to say to him: you have understood us. But if he is given this answer, then it is very much to be feared that the sociologist is in error, that he has stepped out of his true role in order to assume that of mediator, or that of ideologist. The sociologist's only justification is that he should arrive at an understandfng of social relations that cannot be grasped by the actors themselves but that make it possible to explain and predict their conduct in defined conditions.
TE SYSTEM OF HSTOROL / O O N
A. The Dominion of Historicity Historicity is first of all the creation of a model of knowledge and therefore a distancing in relation to the circuit of social exchanges, either between members of the collectivity or between collectivity and environment. But it is not representation solely. Formed on the basis of a state of activity, it intervenes in that activity; it transforms it into a social system in which conduct is governed by a set of orientations, themselves determined by the societyVTnode of action upon itself. Accumulation provides historicity with means of action, but it is on the basis of the cultural model that social practice's field of orientation is constituted/Society is not reducible to the laws that govern its functioning; nor is it governed by ideas, which is to say by any meaning given as external to social practice, whether it be some divine law or historical determinism. It is constituted by itself—the social is explicable solely by the social—which is to say by its own means and its consciousness of acting on itself. Is this not handing back a central role to the Idea? Is this cultural model not perhaps an image of the ideal society, against which social conduct is to be measured? Nothing could be further removed from the concept of the cultural model. Ijjsjn no wayseparable from the work that society performs on itself: it is situated by a type of work and accumulation; it manifests the material state of society's apprehension of itself. The system of historical action, the SHA. is the system of historicity's dominion over social practice. It is not a more or less coherent set of values or principles but the linking together of elements in tension with one another, since through thern society is straddled by its double, as in African religions the believer is straddled by spirits. 65
66
Chapter Two
This leads to encounters with three successive orders of problems. First, how is this system based on tensions constructed? Second, how is it to be recognized, for it must be observable and thus possess a concrete autonomy beyond the oppositions that form its nature? Last, what is the relation of this set of orientations, which defines the sociocultural field, with the other face of historicity, that of accumulation, of society's tearing apart of itself, and thus with class relations? Since the system of historical action defines a field, it delimits types of societies and thus a first level of analysis of historical realities. How are we to construct those types without slipping back into an evolutionist philosophy of history? That will be the theme of the last section of this chapter. a.
Dimensions
Having defined historicity as orientation of social practice and thus as a distancing of society in relation to its own functioning, let us now undertake the reverse operation and define historicity's mode of dominion over social practice. Unless we do this we are running a serious danger of reducing historicity to a reflection of society on itself, to an ideology of social change, two interpretations that have been clearly rejected in previous pages. Within historicity, its three components do not play the same role in this dominion over social practice, in this constitution of a field of social and cultural orientations. The model of knowledge is at the same time the most direct and the least socially organized expression of historicity. It governs the forces of production at the same time as it is forming itself on them as a basis, but without intervening in the social systems that interpose themselves between it and historicity. Accumulation, on the other hand, is a linking process between economic activity and historicity. It explains the practical division of society from itself; but it does not explain the orientation of social conduct by historicity. This latter role is that of the cultural model. An image of creativity and thus of historical action, in the last analysis it governs the categories of social and cultural practice. It is this set of orientations, this system of historicity's dominion over practice, that I term system of historical action. Through it, social practice is determined not by its internal laws or the exigencies of social life but by the resources mobilized in the service of a cultural model. The system links historicity and functioning. It cannot be the formal expression of the cultural model, as though the "idea" of a society were specifying itself in different institutional domains—economic, political, religious, and so on. It associates contraries and thus defines itself by tensions. It is simultaneously an apparatus for transcending social functioning and the determination of that functioning.
The System of Historical Action
67
To construct the system of historical action is thus to define the oppositional pairs that specify the tension between historicity and functioning. Instead of enumerating the elements which, taken together, would constitute that system, we must start from the system's general nature, which is that of bond and at the same time tension between historicity and the elements of social activity. The elements of the system cannot be defined other than by combining these axes of complementarity and opposition. We can define a certain number of oppositional pairs that can be seen as dimensions of the system of historical action. I shall indicate only what seem to me the three most essential of these. Certain aspects of the analyses that follow would be made much more complicated if we increased this number, but the nature of the reasoning employed would not be modified. /. Movement—order. A society's movement is inseparable from its order. Historicity cannot manifest itself except by being transcribed into social relations. This principle of movement must also be a principle of order, failing which it would be no more than an abstract idea, and the sociological domain as a whole could be analyzed with the help of concepts relating to the functioning of the social system. That is the first dimension of the system of historical action. It is the process by means of which a movement is transformed into order. This order is inseparable from the movement, but it is also opposed to it, just as distribution or consumption are opposed to production at the same time as being linked to it. Historical action is in noway a pure movement of continual transcendence of the social order. It constitutes a social order and, therefore, types of society. The tension between movement and order is thus that of the two faces of historicity—the transcendence of social functioning and the foundation of the categories of social practice. The present analysis locates itself solely within the field of historicity. It does not present the relalibhs of historicity with institutions or with social organization. However, the slope of the system of historical action termed "order" already leads down toward social organization. This is why 1 employ the more general term: the categories of social practice. 2. Orientations—resources. This opposition is implied in the very concept of historicity. Human action is always divided between orientations and resources. The latter can be termed "natural" in the sense that they are the object of study of the natural sciences. The means brought into action by a cultural model constitute sets of variables, systems. The natural sciences make it possible to know the rules in accordance with which those systems function, whereas they do not explain the nature of the orientations that
68
Chapter Two
make use of them. In parallel to this, man intervenes as a being with needs, which is to say with his biological existence, his personality problems, and also with the roles he plays in the reproduction of society. A religious typejrf cultural model, orienting society toward an extremely abstract image of creativity, is associated with a very strong structuration of the community and the systems of exchange that ensure its continuity and survival: the principle of universal order is above social action but takes responsibility for the social organization of collectivities profoundly entrenched in their reproduction, as indicated by the very fact that the cultural model indicates a low capacity on the part of society to act upon itself. Inversely, in industrialized societies it may seem that society's capacity for action on itself no longer has any limits, that its Promethean ambition makes it into its own creator. This is by no means the case. As the elementary structures of social organization break up, so historicity encounters resistance from other resources: first from technology itself, but also from those of man's biological conditions of existence, as well as those of other parts of nature, and last those of personality. We must therefore be wary of two opposing errors. Man is not a demiurge; the more powerful his action, the more, on the other hand, he ceases to recognize himself as spirit and replaces himself in the finite world of which he forms a part. Inversely, man does not simply occupy a niche within an ecosystem. Society is neither a closed system nor even a system defined by its exchanges with the environment. It possesses the capacity to intervene in itself, in its internal organization, in the same way as in its relations with the external world. Society is part of an ecosystem, but it also constitutes its own environment on the basis of an action that is not reproductive but inventive. It is nature, but it is also a creator of nature. At a time when society's capacity for action on itself is increasing rapidly and threatening the ecosystem of which man is a part, it is normal that criticism of the ancient separation between nature and culture, of the opposition between body and mind that triumphed with idealism, should lead to a new naturalism derived not from mechanics, as in the seventeenth century, but from biology. But. just as social thought, after the naturalism of the Enlightenment and under pressure of historical events, rediscovered through the industrial revolution, the French Revolution, and the beginnings of the labor movement, the problems of historical action, so the development of a new model of knowledge based on information, communications, and systems analysis must be followed by new thinking on historical action and its present forms. 3. Culture—society. The juxtaposition of these two terms does not immediately conjure up an oppositional couple in the same way as order and
The System of Historical Action
69
movement or orientations and resources. And yet the system of historical action cannot be defined without this opposition. For the system is the dominion of historicity oyer society's functioning: it is therefore work and the creation of a relation with the environment on the one hand, and collectivity on the other. A system of historical action is not a political, territorial, and organizational unit, but nor is it an intention on the part of society. It is a model of a society, and thus both a culture and social forms. The linking of culture and society, of the relation to environment and the relations of the actors among themselves, is nevertheless subordinate to the two others. It cannot be defined except within the intersection of the two previous oppositional pairs. The system of historical action is a set of social forms making it possible to pass from a cultural model, a model of creativity, to a model of consumption situated on the side of order and resources. The social elements are interposed between the cultural elements. A cultural model calls for the employment of social resources and the creation of a principle of order. It is within these social forms that a model of consumption is formed, and it is by means of the model that cultural conduct is subjected to the dominion of the cultural model. The system of historical action is thus defined by the intersection of oppositional pairs. This sets it in sharp contrast to a social organization defined by norms and by the vertical and horizontal differentiation of statuses and roles. It is not a society's book of rules but the scenario of its drama, the mobilization of its action upon itself on the basis of its work. The dialectic of historical action is made up of oppositions and complementarities between a society's will to be and its being, between its self-production and its practice. Social action is not defined solely by exchanges within a totality or by responses to stimuli; between the material conditions of existence and the forms of social and cultural organization^ it interposes a system of prientations, the system of historical action—thejembodiment, oflhistoricity^ b.
Elements
It is now possible to sum up our previous analysis by combining the three dimensions just dealt with and using them to construct the system of historical action. Combining the three dimensions we have established enables us to situate the elements of the system of historical action but not to define their nature and their relations. We must therefore add that the system of historical action as a whole is the mode of historicity's dominion over social practices and, more precisely, a set j)f sociocultural orientations governing the torms of labor, that is, economjc activity^ The elements are not consiHtlierits~oT ecbfiibmic activity, but their totality must constitute a field of socioeconomic organization. They may be presented by means of a diagram (fig. 2).
70
Chapter Two
The first element in the system we already know. It is the cultural model. If accumulation introduces class relations directly, the cultural model indicates recognition of a form of creativity that is the driving force of society and utilizes the accumulated resources. order
movement T
cultural model
hierarchization
mobilization
needs
orientations
Figure 2
The cultural model is movement not order, orientation not resource, culture not society. Before we name the other elements, it remains for us to define their relations to one another, since we know the dimensions along which they occur and their general nature. It is the attribute of the SHA to link historicity and the functioning of society and thus to associate elements that are as opposed to one another as possible in order to combine the three oppositional pairs selected. It is easy to see that the simplest image of the SHA is that which combines the three oppositional pairs to produce four elements of which each has the same position as each of the three others on one of the dimensions and is opposed to them on the two other dimensions. But the composition of the SHA can be more clearly and directly grasped when it is borne in mind that its elements must form a whole that takes in all the tensions defined by the combination of the three oppositional pairs. The cultural model must be completed by an element that puts social resources at the service of the cultural model; otherwise that model would be no more than an ideology or a dream. 1 term this element mobilization since it involves giving a content to society's movement, to the transcendence of its functioning. We must now move over to the side of order, to the transformation of the sub-unit formed by the cultural model and the mobilization of socioeconomic activity into organization. The cultural model must be linked to a corresponding mode of hierarchization. If it weren't, then society would be cut in two, a crisis situation worthy of examination but one that only appears as a crisis in relation to the expected correspondence between the cultural model
The System of Historical \ction
71
and a scale of social levels. I am not talking here about social classes, for all that is involved here is a scale, whereas the classes are defined solely by class relations, based in their turn on accumulation. Nor am 1 talking about stratification, even though this second notion is closer to that of hierarchization, simply because the system of historical action is no more than an analytical tool, whereas one cannot talk of stratification except with reference to a more concretely and territorially defined organization. Last, historicity governs not only this principle of distribution but also, and simultaneously, a mode of consumption, a definition of needs, an element at once cultural and not social, deriving from resources and not orientations and thus complementary to hierarchization within the domain of order. This construction can be presented most concisely in a diagram (see fig. 2). The diagram presented in figure 2 does not show a division of the economic organization into four specific domains. It does not describe the functioning of a society but the social and cultural orientations by means of which a state of historicity controls and directs soaaT practice. What is also involved here is a system: the nature of each of the elements is defined by the position it occupies within the whole. Each is linked to the three others by relations of proximity and opposition in the pairs that form the system's basic construction unit. The transition from one element to the other is not a transition from one particular aspect of a general principle to another particular aspect of it. On the contrary, the nature of the SHA forces us to dismiss such a formulation and its attendant lemptations. Is there not a tendency to say that the forms of mobilization or hierarchization must be in harmony with the cultural model? A dangerous phrase if we do not make it clear that this "harmony" is achieved by combining oppositions rather than resemblances, since any two elements are always linked by two relations of opposition and only one of similitude, It is therefore impossible to reduce the system of historical action to a "general idea" of society; the tensions that set its individual elements in opposition are merely the small change of the general tension that simultaneously unites and separates a society's junction big and its historicity. Those who think in terms of values and norms can show how particular norms, adapted to such and such a specific ^institutional" domain, are no more than specific forms of more general values. Here, on the contrary, what is being shown in action and specified is the action of society on itself, its distancing with relation to its own functioning. If the elements are in harmony writh each other that is because they are also in opposition to one another, so that the SHA is wholly animated by the tensions inherent in the movement by means of which society constitutes the field of its social and cultural orientations on the basis of its activity, therebygiving that activity meaning. The SHA is not an organ of social and cultural integration that will
72
Chapter Two
impose, above and beyondjany differences between its elements, the unity of a body of values. It does not exist outside its internal oppositions; it is the system of those oppositions. This clearly indicates the complete difference that exists between the SHA and a system of social control or a political system. We are used to speaking about societies, that is, about concrete political units possessing laws and a government, mechanisms of exchange, production, education, repression, and soon. The SHA is not a society, even less what is referred to by the rather vague term ''social system," but solely a level within an analysis of society. The system of historical action is not an actor exercising power or authority; there is no system of social control ensuring its maintenance. It is an abstract system, as against an organization, which is a concrete system in the sense that it is defined by frontiers and by the authority exercised within them. It is essential to recognize this difference of definition between the units encountered by the various levels of sociological analysis. "Capitalist society" is a type of unit that does not coincide with political collectivities, and even less with concrete historical units. All we are establishing for the moment is the thematics of a general type of society, before going on to see the actors act and mechanisms of decision, organization, or control form within it. The SHA is a system of oppositions because it is the form taken by historicity, by society's transcendence of itself by itself. The SHA must therefore be conceived of as a totality and not as the result of adding together a certain number of elements, each essential to its functioning. B.
Locating the System of Historical Action
How does the sociologist apprehend the system of action? Is it a construction of the mind, not susceptible of any apprehension by experience and without usefulness other than as a necessary element in an analysis? A necessary hypothesis to explain certain kinds of behavior? Such a mode of approach cannot be sufficient. The system of historical action must be capable of a direct approach since it possesses a certain autonomy of operation. Then what is the object of a sociology of this system of action? What facts does it take into consideration? a.
A Society's Debates
The analyses just presented enable us to avoid a trap. The elements of the system of action are not experienced as values. They are not affirmed by members of a society as imperatives, like the good, the desirable, or the just.
The System of Historical Action
73
They do not appear as objectives except tor particular social actors, thereby contributing to the formation of their ideology. But this presupposes that we have already brought these actors and their conflicts into play, which is not in fact the case. The elements of the system of action are thus neither recognized as values, nor defended or championed. This does not make them any the less present to the collective consciousness, but they are taken as facts, not as values. In programmed societies—which we shall continue to use as an example for reasons of convenience—although growth has been defined as the cultural model it is in no way asserted as a value. At the very most it js frequently justified by what appears to be its direct consequence: the raising of the standard of living. But that itself is a specific ideology, one to which another can be easily opposed. Growth is equally experienced as constraint, as the pressure of artificially created needs, as an exhausting rat race that makes life hard and robs it of all meaning, or as the destruction of "natural resources." Let an argument begin between these two ideologies, and it becomes very swiftly apparent that growth is in itself a neutral fact that can be judged favorably or unfavorably according to the point of view adopted. Scientific progress means a car and a television for everyone, something that many find desirable. But it also means the threat of thermonuclear annihilation, something that fills almost everyone with horror. The same observation can easily be applied to all the other elements. Judgment with regard to them is always ambivalent and provides food for literally endless argument. A banal but enlightening conclusion. For this ambivalence is nothing other than the apprehension of the relations of complementarity and opposition that link the elements together. Growth is a good thing because it brings with it more "modern" forms of organization and hierarchization or types of needs, which liberate us from the constraints of a previous system; it is a bad thing in that it is opposed to the requirements inherent in the other elements, it is continuous movement, not enjoyment, etc. What reveals the system of action is the totality of the debates that animate a society, the totality formed by the problems with which the collectivity is faced. This totality is not immediately apprehensible. It must be isolated from two different orders of problem: on the one hand, the social conflicts that set one category of actors in opposition to another, and which cannot be involved here; on the other hand, the problems that arise from the heterogeneity of a concrete society. French society, for example, can be viewed partly as a programmed society, but it also includes vast areas of the older capitalism and even some preindustrial economic, social, and cultural aspects. Every society in the process of change experiences tensions and hiatuses between
74
Chapter Two
various generations of problems and actors. Social conflicts and tensions linked with change must be kept separate from what I am here terming a society's debates. The system of action is revealed not by a body of values but by a systemi of^ debates. Each of its elements is apprehended in its opposition to each of the others, and the unity of the system cannot be perceived other than as the field of those debates within which choices are imposed that are insoluble and constitute a society's permanent problems. Each of the oppositions perceived is viewed as normal and intolerable. It links two terms of which either can be accepted or rejected, while it is never possible to terminate the debate with a compromise. It is therefore possible to draw up a map of the problems a society puts to itself, to the degree in which that society corresponds to a system of action. These problems never receive a solution', the historian merely observes that at some given moment they cease to be posed or they become blurred and fade. Actionalist sociology begins by defining the nature of these debates, which are endless but nevertheless form a limited whole. Schematically we could say that a system of action is experienced as a network of problems at once general and insoluble corresponding to the relations of one of the four elements with each of the three others. But there naturally exist more complex problems that involve more than two elements Above all the expression of these problems is not constant. There exists within any given society, and insofar as it corresponds to a system of action, a realm of discourse that must be reconstituted on the basis of the common consciousness, of good sense. The cerebration of its intellectuals can provide a guide in one's search for the boundaries and themes of this discourse, but nothing can replace a direct study of public opinion. Public opinion is almost always studied in isolation, referred to the facts, to the situation, to which it is a reaction. Opinions of various actors are compared; attempts are made to grasp the differences between what is being thought by the young and the old, by the workers and the leaders of industry, by men and women. This kind of analysis is interesting, albeit limited; it enlarges the Field of historiography; but it has no relation to the analysis we are referring to here. Instead of differentiating between the actors we are looking for the unity of a discourse, not in order to find in it the unity of a system of beliefs and values that doesn't exist but, quite the opposite, in order to define a network of oppositions, of questionings. Debates in our sense do not bear upon the positive or negative value of a cultural or social feature, but upon the relations between such features. This corresponds to the nature of the system of action, which is not an aggregate of elements but a system of relations by means of which those elements are
The System of Historical Act on
75
defined. Each of the elements is only defined within the system by its opposition along certain axes with each of the others. The debate must be distinguished from djscussion and from deliberation. I speak of discussion when the field of the exchange is defined by a decision to be taken that will affect the relative position of the actors. A discussion can always be termed political in the sense that it presupposes an institutional order and, therefore, limits, the most obvious of which is the acceptance of the existence of the actors taking part in the discussion. There is no discussion between a union and a board of directors except insofar as the board recognizes the existence of the union. Not infrequently such recognition is accompanied by mental reservations. The board may think that everything would be so much easier and more pleasant if there were no unions, and the union on its side may be thinking that the ultimate aim of its action is the suppression of employers and their replacement by a workers' cooperative or some other decision-making system. But, if one of the partners estimates at any given moment that it has become possible to change the name of the political game, there the discussion ceases. A deliberation is even further removed from debate than discussion is. It presupposes the recognition of norms, collective aims, and roles. If a group meets to examine its activities or the relations between its members, then it is probable that what is involved, at least to begin with, is a deliberation rather than a debate or a discussion, in the sense I am using the terms here. What is presupposed is a community, not just a field of decision. What are we going to do to further the aims of the community? How can we resolve this conflict that has appeared within it? Is authority being properly exercised? Ought we to change the community's functions or recruitment to it? These examples show immediately that problems subjected to deliberation are defined as functions of the social system. When we move on from deliberation to debate, the relations between the actors fade away. Whereas a deliberation highlights roles and, consequently, social relations, while a discussion strives to modify those relations, or the lines of communication, or the forms of authority, in the debate there is no other character than the situation itself, which is no longer a framework but the very stake of the debate. Adebatejs a drama; the characters involved are not the true actors. A pure debate, one not associated with set elements of discussion, may well be intolerable for actors brought face to face. We should therefore not limit our investigation_Jo_rc debates. A society's debates may be reconstituted from limited exchanges usually over some distance, employing speech or writing. The actors answer one another without communicating.
76
b.
Chapter Two
The Agencies of Historicity
If we reduce historicity to the stake involved in social conflicts, we are in danger of viewing it as an ideological expression of the dominant class; but if we recognize it as possessing an autonomous social expression, are we not in danger of restoring to the center of our analysis a body of values, of norms, and thus of institutions, in the usual sense of that word? Historicity is not an ideological construction. It is a set of cultural and social orientations presenting themselves tojhe actorjs societal data and not as paHicularlzed beliefs. In postindustrial society, scientific and technological investment, the cybernetic model of organization, hierarchization by education, consumer orientation are not opinions. Nor are they values that can be directly translated into forms of social organization, since it is not possible to understand social organization by abstracting conflictive class relations and the political mechanisms for formulating the rules that govern that organization. This objection stated, let us recognize that each element.in.the. system of historical action has a concrete social underpinning that I shall term^an agency of historicity, which is not a historical actor in the way the social classes are. An example will make clear what I mean. No science can exist without laboratories and research centers, just as there can exist no religion without a church, which is to say without a specialized religious function." It is absurd to claim that science is no more than a stake in a class conflict and that there is a proletarian science as opposed to a bourgeois science or an Aryan science as opposed to a Jewish science. But it is equally false to think that the organization of science is just the direct transcription of a specific social function. One has only to look at the politics of research, at the organization of research centers and, even more so. of the universities, and it immediately becomes impossible to abstract science from class interests and orientations. The social organization of research cannot evade the effects of political and social conflicts, as the confrontations we have seen over research investment make clear. Growing awareness of the political and military effects of many scientific discoveries, and, more particularly, of the social and political determinants behind the choice of research undertaken, makes it no longer possible to look upon laboratories as ivory towers. Scientists do not exist above and apart from the social and political fray; at the same time their science is not reducible to the ideology of the actors in confrontation. Scientists always find themselves in a false position: they are defending the autonomy of scientific knowledge against ideological pressures and, especially, against established power. But the confrontation between opposing classes or social forces only has to grow fiercer for them to find themselves torn apart. They must defend their independence against power and therefore feel themselves closer to the forces of opposition and protest.
The System of Historical Action
77
But these latter are also seeking, through their struggles, to impose their own ideology- in the scientific domain. So the scientists fear that political confrontation will destroy science's independence, either because it will be forced to conform to an orthodoxy or because a transaction will take place between the adversaries to the detriment of scientific research's "purity." Scientists, and indeed all the categories of the "priestly" intelligentsia, are neither pure intelligences floating above the melee nor ideologists. They are linked to the ruling class to the degree in which that class dominates the system of historical action and the political system, and thus favor certain areas of research. They are aTso TmkeOo the ruling class to the degree in which they belong to apparatuses that form ajpart^t^^e ruling_class. Inversely, they are constantly setting up their competence in opposition to the political and administrative power of decision and fighting the limits set to the movement of ideas and persons. Professionalism is often a way of transcending these contradictory tendencies and defining professional organizations and groups outside their links with the holders of power in society. Thus the intelligentsia occupy three positions simultaneously: neutrality and involvement with one social camp or the other. What defines the members of an agency is not their detachment from the social interests in conflict but the mixture within the group, and more often than not within the individuals themselves, of these three positions. The same observations apply to the other elements of the system of historical action. The organizers, those who analyze the management of systems, are also experts caught between defense of their rationality and their ambiguous position in class and political relations. Hence the constant mixture of reserve or mistrust they display with regard to the ruling class, as well as to popular movements, and their tendency to develop ideological defenses in the form of technologism or scientism. A society's mode of hierarchization, which belongs on the side of order, is embodied in aji_agency, ofhistoricity of a different kind. Education is responsible for_ this function. The teachers, who can also sometimes be researchers but in the vast majority of cases have different functions, provide a social hierarchization that in postindustrial society is actually based on education itself, which gives the category of teachers a functional autonomy it did not possess in previous societies, where hierarchization was based, for example, on property or citizenship. It must immediately be added that the role of agency of historicity performed by education is in no way a complete definition of education's functions in society. But it must be stressed immediately that education's role of social selection in accordance with a mode of hierarchization is always associated with another role, that of reproduction or reinforcement of class oppositions. These two functions can
78
Chapter Two
no more be identified with one another than they can be dissociated. Education seeks to select those generally most fit to receive higher education, since it must provide the necessary means for scientific development. But it also creates or reinforces class barriers to the mobility of talent, and the way these two functions are mixed up together is shown by the fact that a judgment on fitness for higher education is always also a judgment on social training in the use of a language that is the language of the upper classes. The ambiguity of the teachers1 situation is apparent in the constant mixture of opposition and conformism that characterizes their behavior. In this they are like all agents of historicity, from priests to scientists, who are all simultaneously watchdogs and protesters. We shall see later how the clash between these two functions leads all agents of historicity to develop an abstract rhetoric that cannot be reduced either to a class ideology or to an / element of historicity, and which is more a line of professional defense than the mask for interests foreign to the group itself. It is probably in the expression of needs that the existence of an autonomous agency is most difficult to recognize. The difficulty seems particularly great in the postindustrial societies, where the orientation of needs can be defined as a search for personal or collective identity and as enjoyment. Nevertheless, in this particular casejTze agents of massive means of communication, that is, the agents of the social processing of needs, do in fact occupy the same ambiguous position as the other agencies of historicity. As in the other cases, the observer is first of all aware of the dominant class's dominion over the expression and social orientation of needs. An abundant and suggestive literature speaks loudly and not unjustifiably about the manipulation of needs. This is an indispensable reaction against the propaganda of the dominant classes which assures society with false ingenuousness that advertising is a response to individual demand and thus acquires a democratic function. But, because criticism of such claims has been voiced for a long time, and with no lack of the necessary energy, we must look further. A more attentive study of business and advertising brings significant conflicts to light. The area of fashion provides one of the most interesting examples today. Whereas fashion properly speaking is a system of social hierarchization and, beyond that, the creation of badges of social level, the apparel trade also finds itself drawn into supporting movements launched by the young and recognized as signs of cultural innovation. So that the trade cannot be wholly assimilated with society's apparatuses of economic direction, which manipulate demand in the name of the functioning of their power and their profit. Dependent upon technocrats, the traders and advertisers are also, in nontotalitarian societies, dependent upon the formation of cultural trends that are in no way the direct creation of the centers of economic decision. The same remarks apply to the professionals of the mass media.
The System of Historical Action
79
In this case, as in the others, we would be denying the existence of social classes if we ignored the dominant hold of the upper class over the agencies of historicity. But it would also be false to see these latter as merely agents of social domination. Last, it is equally unacceptable to place these agencies above the social fray. Their role is always limited and subordinate within the field of historical action and also, as a consequence, in the political system. But they do have a certain autonomy that is recognizable in the appearance of specific functions at the level of social organization. This relative and subordinate autonomy of the agencies of historicity is the concrete expression of a society's historicity. The stakes of class conflicts are not abstractions or ideologies but social practices. Class conflicts occur within a certain social and cultural field ot historicity. It is never permissible to say that this field constitutes on its own the principle of society's organization; a factory is not the concrete expression of industrial growth; it cannot be defined independently of the class power exercised within it. But parallel to this, social struggles are determined by the system of historical action, by the nature of the forces of society's production of itself, which those struggles transform in their turn into class relations and consequently into a political system and a system of social organization.
C.
The Functioning of the System of Historical Action
a.
The Counterelements
The SHA could be defined as a system of imbalances. The cultural model is not situated at its center, like a spider in the middle of its web, organizing and controlling social activities. Jt js^a driving force, but one that must be converted into order and also into mobilization of resources in order to play that role. It is not an ideal model of society but a set of orientations that govern social practice. It can be presented in a slightly different way from the one 1 used earlier. Figure 3 shows that the alternation of full and empty boxes is that of the orientations of historical action and the actors' objectives. The system of historical action is a network of oppositions governed by the nature of the cultural model. It is the dominion of orientations over resources, of movement over order, and the interdependence of cultural orientations and social forms. The tensions between its elements mean that society is not a character being guided by an image of the ideal society. The cultural model is not a social model of movement. The system of historical action is not an actor but what is at stake in an interplay of actors.
Chapter Two
80
order
movement
i
i
orientations
cultural model
2
hierarchization
4
resources
1
mobilization
3
needs
culture
society
society
culture
i Figure 3
If we introduce actors, with due consideration of their objectives and their values, we see that they cannot act other than by breaking the structure of the system of historical action, by destroying the oppositions separating the elements from one another, and by fusing the elements into their objectives. The objectives are the actors' guides not in an action of society upon itself but in the functioning of a social organization. These objectives are thus the opposite of the elements of historical action and cannot arise except from its destruction, which is to say from the appropriation by one actor of the system of historical action and from its reduction by that actor to an organization and the functioning of that organization. This is why they must be termed counterelements. They are representations given value by actors and not orientations of historical action itself. The counterelements are the values of class actors and no longer the stake of class relations. Let us take the empty box 2 in figure 3. It designates an orientation toward movement, but a social movement. What is involved, therefore, is a sociocultural model of movement—a definition immediately clear to every reader as actor. It is the image of an ideal society toward which individuals and collectivities are struggling to make headway. In reality the content of this box is even more extensive and integrative than I have just suggested: this sociocultural model, like any image of an ideal society, is a model of order as much as it is of movement. It is thus apparent that a counterelement can be empirically defined as the locus of overflow and commingling of the elements surrounding it. In more theoretical terms, each counterelement breaks the oppositions upon which the system of historical action is based; it replaces a tension, which Is a manifestation of historicity, by identity of functioning and so-called rational action. This replacement is not the work of the system of historical action itself; it can only arise from the ideological activity of the actors. Nothing could demonstrate better that the SHA cannot be defined in terms of social or collective consciousness. Social consciousness posits values or
The System of Historical Action
81
situations of fact, it posits order or movement; it cannot orient conduct toward objectives that vanish whenever it tries to pin them down, since the elements all refer back one to another in an endless play of complementarities and oppositions. ^ejTansition from elements to counterelements is the transition from system to actors. A counterelement can be represented by a self-sufficient image, whereas one can never define an element outside of its relations with the other elements. Can this general analysis based on one specific case be applied to other cases? Yes. since the various elements of the system occupy equivalent positions within it. But the content of the various counterelements must still be defined, case by case, for all that. So let us look at case 1 (in fig. 3). As in case 2. which we have just looked at, this counterelement cannot be understood,„excej)t as the fusion of the three elements surrounding it. The cultural model is reduced to a technique, mobilization becomes a cultural and no longer a social form, and needs are transformed into resources at the service of movement. It is easy to recognize the presence of this counterelement in our own society. It is enough to say, in fact, that our society is powered by a scientific and technical mode of growth, but that it is the organizations that adapt themselves pragmatically to the changing environment, manage their communications better and better, utilize the information they produce more and more efficiently in order to correct their course and ensure their survival. They thus produce a development that is no longer an orientation but a result of certain practices. There is no longer distance and tension between the cultural model and the social resources mobilized: the two elements are commingled. Needs are no more than the expression of this transformation of social resources into cultural resources. Individuals and groups seek to maximize their advantages and lower their costs; they also seek to extend the field they control, and it is the totality of these self-interests, combining to produce this flexible and dynamic organization, that produces growth as its end result. One can certainly give other expressions to this fusion of elements into a coulfterelement. We shall see that counterelements. because they belong to the world of actors, take on different colorations according to whether they are acting as guide to one class or another. But one image will suffice to convey the mechanism behind the formation of this counterelement. which is situated on the level of resources and not on that of orientations. I shall term it instrumentalism, in order to emphasize the elimination of any reference to a cultufaT'model of movement. Case 3 is analogous to the preceding one since it too dispenses with the presence of orientations. But it is doubly cut off from them in that it is situated on the side of order and on the side of society' rather than culture.
82
Chapter Two
The social order is no longer anything but a factual organization, lacking any hierarchical principle. The variety of social categories is fused in this case with the mode of mobilization. Society, one might say, is reduced to the technical division of labor, and the nature of needs can no longer be linked with anything other than that social organization. This gives an image of a society at once diversified and stable, a society in which everyone fulfills a function and lives in a particular way, the different functions organizing themselves together so as to answer to society's needs, without the need of any intervening principle of hierarchy. It is perhaps easier in this case than in the others to understand both why such a counterelement destroys the system as a whole and corresponds to representations and to an ideal image of society—ideal since it is beyond the tensions that define the system of action and are experienced by the actors. Hierarchization is replaced here by what one may term segmentation. Case 4, like case 1, is that of a counterelement located on the level of orientations. It is a model of cultural order. But the existence of such a model is not compatible with that of a cultural model. It would only be so if the system of action were presented as an unstable equilibrium between opposing demands, such as activity and contemplation, which would transform the SHA into an endless interplay of rhetorical oppositions and entirely contradict all the analysis we have so far made of it. This model of order cannot therefore be conceived except as the fusion of the elements surrounding it. Cultural practices and social hierarchy fuse in it to give rise to a model of sociocultural integration, and this model is also merged with a model of movement. Here again it is easy to observe an expression of the model in our own society. What else is the notion of a society of mass consumption? A society based on hierarchized needs that possess sufficient impetus to provide the driving force of society's movement. In this view, it is the rush to consume that creates the progress of production. Once again a reassuring image, one that rids us at little cost of the necessities inherent in the model of scientific growth, of the constraints of the great organizations, and the dominion of social hierarchy. This counterelement, like the others, is a means of transcending the tensions of historical action. Our analysis has up to now introduced the counterelements one by one; but if we look at them all together, do they form a system, just like the elements? Ought we not speak of a countersystem, so that an analysis of historical action should be in the first place an analysis of the relations existing between these two systems that possess the same formal characteristics, the same relations between the elements or counterelements that compose them? This formal parallelism is very clear and results from the construction of the SHA itself. It is important, for it signifies that the images, which are the
The System of Historical Action
83
counterelements, are simultaneously interdependent and opposed, so that within any given type of SHA we ought to be able to isolate a well-defined set of ide^s_ahQ.ujt,_society's historicity, of ideal images of that society. order
move/mm
orientations
resources
Culture
SfXil'/V
cultural model
sociocultural model
E
CE
inslrumentalism CE
mobilization
E
E=element CE-counterelement
society
I
culture
,. , • nierarcni/.ation „
soeiocultural integration CE
segmentation
needs E
CE
Figure 4
But this docs not lead on to the integration of the elements and counterelements into a much larger unity. The SHA is the.proces_s_ot"_society*s action upon itself on the basis of its experience and its awareness of creativity and accumulation. The countersystem, if we are to call it that, is no more than a set of contradictory representations. Each of the counterelements destroys the system and thus presents itself as a total image, excluding all others. Let us go back to our example. Our postindustrial society can be thought of as an instrumental society, as a creation of the collective will, as a set of functional segment^ or as a mass society. But these are all conflicting ways of looking at one thing. Transition from one counterelement to another is impossible.-"~ But the counterelements can't be chased out of our field of analysis as easily as all that. If we try to unite them into a whole, then the analysis goes completely astray. Whereas, if we recognize that they break the relation between two or several elements, then their existence appears necessary. No entirely integrated and balanced system of action can exist. The elements oscillate around the axes that define them, penetrating with each oscillation into the area of the counterelements. Equilibrium is maintained only if two opposing counterelements exert opposite and counterbalancing pressures. The counterelements are active; they manifest themselves as wills, as intentions, as principles. Whereas the element is apprehended by the actors only as a problem, a nexus of oppositions, the counterelement asserts itself in its stability as the objective of social conduct. The oscillation between elements and counterelements is a manifestation of that which joins or separates actors and of the stake of their relation. The social field is defined solely by its tensions and its imbalances, behind which
84
Chapter Two
there can always be glimpsed the distancing of society from itself and historicity's dominion over social practices. Each counterelement, on the contrary, because it is simultaneously a social and a cultural unit, defines expected types of conduct. The actor's situation is defined within it by the position he occupies in relation to the others and his degree of participation in a model of conduct. But the counterelement has unity and simplicity^only in appearance. We shall see later that the social classes and social movements interpret them simultaneously in contradictory ways. More directly, each counterelement is torn by oppositions that necessarily refer back to the elements and the relations between them. Let us take an example in our type of society. Its counterelement of sociocultural integration is mass consumption, situated at the meeting point of man's "natural" needs and a social hierarchy based on knowledge and thus on education. Now mass consumption, if we examine it, falls into two opposing principles: on the one hand the social hierarchy of consumption and the importance of status symbols in the objects and modes of consumption; on the other hand the individualization of need and enjoyment. Mass consumption is shot through with two opposing movements: the quest for status and the expectation of pleasure. We shall see later that opposing historic actors do not attach themselves simultaneously to the same aspect of a counterelement. The latter's unity is therefore artificial, but it cannot for that reason be neglected by analysis. The totality of counterelements forms a civilization. This word denotes a set of representations, of images. It introduces a unity into society and culture, the unity of consciousness. A civilization is an ideal that the observer finds at the heart of reality. This is why almost everyone in a society is seeking to define a civilization and no one is embarrassed by the incoherence of the definitions given. If we take the notion of civilization in this sense, then it turns its back to sociological analysis. Not only does each counterelement destroy the structure of the SHA, but the counterelements in their turn are kneaded and molded in very diverse ways into all-embracing images of a civilization that each actor, according to his ! social and individual characteristics, contemplates and admires as if he were gazing at some social datum, whereas it is no more than the reflection of his own way of life. The counterelements contribute nothing to the analysis of society, but they guide us toward the actors. The SHA is lived, it cannot be analyzed directly. It can only be apprehended when broken up and transformed into counterelements. This opposition between elements and counterelements opens up one of the principal fields of sociological research. The elements are studied~~as~
The System of Historical Action
85
orientations of social practice; they can be reached by a direct consideration of labor organization, consumption, use of saving, etc. Counterelements, on the other hand, are representations. Thus we are dealing with two materially distinct kinds of evidence. It is importan: to establish the correspondence between them, to investigate how, in any given society, the combination of the counterelements leads us on to posit the existence of the elements, and how the representation of the elements leads to the formation of the counterelements. Analysis of the latter is thus an important means of verifying the validity of a concrete construction of the SHA and. in particular, of the attribution to each of the elements of a certain content of a historical kind. Anticipating on the analysis of this theme, it is essential to mention that the counterelements cannot receive a general social content; they are inevitable given a particular stamp by the actors striving to control the system of historical action and transform its orientations into values. Each counterelement thus presents itself in the form of an opposition between two images of society, one of which belongs to the ideology of the upper class and the other to that of the popular class, either directly or through the intermediary of professional ideologists. An element has a stable and clear content; its complexity comes from its relations with each of the other elements of the system. A counterelement, on the contrary, is independent of all others, though against this it is itself ambiguous, taking in different contents according to the class that is its bearer. Thus I can now replace the term "counter-elements/' introduced in the course of my analysis, with the term that occupies its place in everyday language: values, ^counterelement is not constitutive of a field of historicity; it is the point of view of an actor, who is always in the last analysis a class actor, looking at the system of historical action. Such is indeed the definition already given of values. The relations between elements and counterelements are the relations between the system of historical action and the class actors. We are here at the very center of sociological analysis, since the field of historicity, bedrock of any concrete social collectivity, is defined by the relation of this system of action to this system of actors. The analysis of social classes will turn entirely upon this fundamenfarquestion. b.
The Crises of Historical Action
The SHA is a system of tensions. The elements are not institutional domains, all more or less coherent with one another, in other words, more or less belonging to the same system of values, but are themselves defined on the basis of the conditions of existence of historical action. If there is no link between order and movement, between orientations and resources, between culture and society^ then no historicity can exist. To speak of system is to
86
Chapter Two
posit the interdependence of its parts and thus the equilibrium of the whole. This equilibrium is not maintained by any controlling or regulating forces. There is therefore no reason to grant priority in practice to the state of equilibrium as opposed to states of disequilibrium. For the construction of the analysis, it is a matter of indifference whether or not we know that there do in fact exist societies in equilibrium, in other words, societies all of whose elements belong to the same configuration with the same force or the same distinctness. But we must consider the general effects of disequilibrium. These effects will be called crises. This term is used in opposition to that of conflict, which defines a state of relations between the actors. There exists no inevitable link between a state of crisis and a state of conflict; one can only say that crisis has effects on conflict, in the sense that conflict can be obscured by a state of crisis. The simplest form of such a crisis is when one of the elements is out of step with the others. Let us suppose, for example, a mode of hierarchization lagging behind all the other elements of the SHA and thus still belonging to a previous configuration. Let us imagine a society in which hierarchy is based on family origins and property while the other elements belong to an industrial or post-industrial society. This isolated element tends to spread over into the empty spaces surrounding it, in other words to transform itself into several counterelements in accordance with figure 5. The lagging element changes into a set of representations by the actors not corresponding to the dominant state of society. The presence of a single such element creates a quasi-general non-fit between historical existence and the actors* interplay. This explains the importance in such a society of social problems that are largely false problems, even though they play a considerable role in inter-actor relations. In certain European countries the maintenance of the old system of social hierarchization has entailed a whole set of social and political problems that overload and distort the class conflict within those societies.
Figure 5
CE=counterelement H=hierarchization
In the case of France it is possibly the lagging behind of needs, even more than that of hierarchization, that is most noticeable. This has various effects, from the clericalism-anticlericalism struggle to the maintenance of
The System of Historical Action
87
paternalism in the organization of labor, to the falling back onto particularistic themes like corporatism—three areas corresponding to the counterelements surrounding the element needs. The crisis remains limited however, since only a single element is affected. It becomes central, on the other hand, when one of the system's axes is broken. It follows from the nature of the SHA that it can be affected by three central crises: rupture of the movement-order axis, which is to say the disjunction CM -r M / / H - N; rupture ot the orientations-resources axis, which is to say the disjunction CM + H // M -f N; rupture ot the culture-society axis, which is to say the disjunction CM 4 N / / M ^ H . 1. The first of these will be termed crisis of historicity, since it affects the most general dimension of the SHA. In a society of the modern type it expresses itself as disjunction of the social order and the economy. The economy may be more modern, oriented toward freedom of the market or toward technical progress, whereas the social order remains more archaic. But the reverse situation is no less real: the modernization of the social order and cultural practices can be ahead of the production and labor organization model. The crisis triggered in this way is a social crisis, one that threatens the unity of the society viewed in its historicity. Like any type of crisis, it tends to manifest itself in the importance given to certain categories of actors, which do not coincide with the social classes but are often superimposed upon them. Here these categories are of the old-modern type. One needs only to think of the use of the word "bourgeois" in France: this term is not a simple doublet of capitalist. Whereas the latter is a precise denotation of a dominant class, the word "bourgeois" introduces the idea of archaism, of privilege, of the transformation of the acquired into the transmitted. On the side of the ruling class, as on that of the class being ruled, there exist strong tensions between supporters of the old and supporters of the new that complicate and sometimes blur the class conflict. Such a crisis is thus very likely to occur in economically heterogeneous societies in which a traditional economic sector is being maintained despite economic growth. 2. The second crisis will be termed crisis ofrationaliry. Orientations and resources, ends and means, are in opposition. The social categories that tend to form are of the high-low or elite-masses type. Two contrasting examples spring naturally to mind. Soviet society has a very advanced cultural model
88
Chapter Two
and hierarchization model. The role played in it by science and technique— such as that of education—is considerable. On the other hand, the use made of social and cultural resources, the forms of labor organization and consumption, are archaic. Hence an awareness of opposition between the ruling elite and the mass of the people. In the United States the situation is the reverse one: the forms of mobilization and the nature of needs have both been very much modernized, whereas the modes of movement and order remain very much stamped by earlier capitalist development. Here too we find a lively awareness of opposition between the mass of the people and the elites, an opposition that according to circumstances can be either progressivist or reactionary, but which is never reducible to a class conflict. The resulting crisis can be termed institutional or political, since it affects society's management ability. 3. The third crisis will be called crisis of integration. It threatens the unity of the SHA very directly since it sets culture in opposition to society. In our type of society it opposes production and consumption on the one hand against organization and distribution on the other. This is a cultural crisis, one might say, and one that subjects the personality to extreme pressures. It tends to set change—both in consumption and production—in opposition to social integration. In these days it occurs above all in societies driven by foreign economic forces, as with Quebec, or national economic forces, as with Japan, when the domination of those forces is insufficiently compensated for by mechanisms of political intervention. In each of these cases the split in the SHA leads to the formation of two opposing subsystems in which elements and counterlements are intermixed. These splits may be represented as in figure 6. The opposition of these subsystems is made all the stronger and more complex in that each of them contains counterelements that are in opposition to one another but reinforce one another in their common opposition to those of the other subsystem. It is therefore likely that a crisis of the SHA will entail a predominance of the counterelements and, thus, social struggles centered on control of the counterelements, while reference to society's historicity vanishes. This becomes even more clear-cut in the extreme case of a general crisis of the SHA, a situation in which the three crises already described are superimposed. The SHA then disappears completely and is replaced by the whole formed by the counterelements, the unity of which is artificial. The historical actors are wholly engaged in struggles that become, one may say, ideological, arfd are detached from the problems of historicity. This is the sociological SeTmTtion of decadence, which is the loss of historicity.
The System of Historical Action
crisis of historicity CM M
89
crisis of rationality
H
4
CM
1
3
N
->
M
4.
!
H
4
3
1
N
1
ens \s of m titration CM M
Figure 6
CM = cultural model H = hierarch Nation M = mobilization N = needs Note: The counterelements have been inserted in the subsystems to which two of their three surrounding elements belong. E.g. in the crisis of integration the CE2 has been placed with the elements CM and N, which flank it.
This defines the interest of a study of crises. In a society where there is no crisis, the historical actors struggle around an axis of counterelements but are directly and constantly deflected back to the elements themselves. If the dominant and dominated classes are both defending asociocultural model of development and an instrumental conception of economic progress, the clash between these positions obliges them on the one hand to rediscover a cultural model which is no longer a sociocultural model, since both classes are equally and contradictorily seeking to appropriate it; similarly the class conflict rediscovers the existence of forms of mobilization not reducible to the interests of one class or another, since both can lay claim to them simultaneously. Just as the introduction of the actors inevitably entails transition from elements to counterelements, so the struggle between those actors inevitably reintroduces the elements, which are the stake of that struggle. / But this oscillation between elements and counterelements, between historical problematic and solutions put forward by social consciousness through class conflict, finds itself halted by ernes of the SHA, which create a_certain opacity between elements and counterelements asTHe~result of their noncoincidence. Social consciousness and its conflicts no longer refer directly to the problems of historicity. Ultimately, in a state of generalized
90
Chapter Two
crisis, the social representations in conflict form a closed world. Ideas, images, objectives are all opposing one another without their opposition recognizing a common field. In which case we must not say that the class struggle is victorious. Quite the contrary is true. For all reference to historicity vanishes, and the actors are no longer defining themselves except by the multiple interplay of their oppositions and their competition. Now whatever the precise conception one has of conflicts, they always imply a will to control and direct an overall process of historical change. In a crisis situation this overall process dissolves into the struggle of the actors. The social conflicts are no more than a shadow play. More precisely, the conflicts linked with historicity are downgraded into conflicts situated on the institutional and political level; the social classes also break up and subdivide into a multiplicity of social forces.. Let us picture for a moment those societies in a process of development, tiy nature they are societies in crisis whose elements are broadly failing to coincide with one another because several systems of historical action are at work. The result is that politics acquires a complexity and autonomy unknown in more stable societies, where, on the contrary, the opposition of social classes is much more clearly apparent. Analysis of crisis is indispensable to that of historical actors. It is rare for social classes to occur in the pure state (without even considering here the intervention of actors formed on other levels of social reality—institutions and organizations). The opposition between supporters of old and new, between elite and mass, between innovators and collectivity, is superimposed on that between the classes. Knowledge of crises makes it possible to unravel this tangle and consequently to isolate the general nature of class conflicts, beyond their particular historical manifestations. Study of crises is also the necessary complement to analysis which, having defined the SHA and its elements, has laid the groundwork for an examination of the historical actors by introducing the notion of counterelements, which is to say by passing from historical experience to representations of social consciousness. A crisis is a discordance between the elements and counterelements of historical action. c.
Dominion and Severance
Historicity is the level of analysis governing my procedure as a whole. A society is a particular type of system such that its functioning is governed by its capacity to act upon that functioning, to construct a field of cultural experience on the basis of the capacity to produce work through knowledge, accumulation, and the cultural model. The system of historical action, on the other hand, is a "regional'" concejpt. It defines one of the social systems, oneTbFthe levels of sociological analysis and. through that analysis, of social reality too. A society, seen in its simplest
The System of Historical Action
91
aspects, abstracted from its historical complexity, is the concatenation of three sub-units: the field of historicity, the institutions, the social organization. The system of historical action is one of the two elements of the field of historicity; the other being the class relations that form the field of the historical actors. The system of historical action is organized around the cultural model, a component of historicitv; class relations are more directly linked to accumulation. ^ Even before the theme of social classes is dealt with directly, the interdependence of the system of historical action and class relations must be stressed. There are two kinds of analysis that must never be separated: that of the division of society into classes and that of the way in which it is "powered" by the motive force of historicity and, more directly, by the system of historical action. Everything is social relations, hut everything is also governed by historical action. Conciliation cannot be arrived at between these two orders by dint of compromise, as if the division into classes were never complete and society's orientations never completely integrated one with another. What links those orientations is so fundamental that we ought to find it at the very heart of any analysis. It is in fact historicity, for historicity must inevitably be simultaneously driving force and severance, the constituting principle of a system of historical action and a breaking away from society's functioning. The cultural model is the means by which historicity becomes orientation of social activity; accumulation, on the contrary, betokens the wrenching away of activity toward historicity, while class relations, in a complementary motion, cause this division of society from itself to move downward again toward social organization. If one forgets historicity, if one leaves the system of historical action and class relations in confrontation, their unity and duality contradict one another. Whereas they combine when one recognizes that society is definable only by means of the relation of its historicity and its functioning-, of the dominion of the first over the second, which is also t h e wrenching of the former out of the latter. Analysis does not have to begin from a summit in order to move downward again to the plains of social organization. It is governed by this circular relation: activity — historicity—functioning and therefore by the twin movement of ascent and descent t h a t leads to historicity and then comes back down toward social organization once more. D.
The Configurations of the System of Historical Action
The system of historical action is defined by the relations that unite its
92
Chapter Two
elements, but its content depends upon the situation of labor, since the cultural model itself is linked to a type of accumulation and thus toXcertam level of society's action upon itself, to a certain level of developmentjof creative work and knowledge. We could, therefore, without further delay, leave history to get on with the job of applying the general concepts that have been worked out to each individual concrete society. But that would be rushing things somewhat, and neglecting to establish the reasons that enable us to speak of the structure of historical action. We are absolutely not concerned here with reducing historical analysis to the application of a sociological construction, but with bringing out a number of implications in this concept of the SHA. I shall therefore go back over some points made earlier in this chapter. a.
Construction of the Four Societal Types
The elements of the SHA are.sociological in.nature but correspond to the elements of economic activity. The cultural model corresponds to production, mobilization to the organization of labor, hierarchization to distribution, needs to consumption. This correspondence stems from the very definition of the SHA. which is not a system of ideas but the organization of the movement that drives society to exceed its functioning, in terms of its creative work and in the name of the consciousness of creativity that it is given by that work. But the system of historical action does not coincide with economic activity exactly, term for term, except when society is entirely molded by its historicity. The further one moves away from this situation, the more the cultural model, like accumulation itself, is attached to order rather than to the movement of economic activity. All "historical" societies are thus situated between two extreme points that probably do not correspond to any real case: on the one hand a society of pure reproduction, entirely governed by its laws of function and exchange; on the other, a society entirely master of itself, a voluntary association or a totalitarian nightmare. The space between these points is not occupied by a long struggle upward toward liberty and responsibility but by a variety of societal types, configurations of the system of historical action. Each of them corresponds to the rooting of historicity in one of the elements of economic activity: consumption, distribution, organization, production. This is why they will be referred to here by the name of the economic activity from which they derive and which they transform in meaning and in practice: agrarian, mercantile, industrial, and programmed societies. We are dealing here not with types of total society but only with configurations of the system of historical action. No territorial collectivity
93
The System of Historical Action
can be identified with one of these types. History begins by apprehending concrete totalities that are at the same time systems of historical action, polhlc^rconectm social organizations, states, and modes of social change^The less strong the dominion of historicity over the society's functioning, the less easily can a societal type be isolated from the particular forms of organization, reproduction, and change of particular collectivities. /. The programmed society. In the most economically advanced societies, what is accumulated is the capacity to produce production, the very principle of Creative "work, which is to say knowledge. This is made clear by the importance of education and research, by the decisive role played by information and by the use of information systems in economic growth. The cultural model in this case corresponds to the element P (production) of the economic system. It follows from this that the isomorphism of the two systems is expressed by a term for term correspondence of the elements of the SHA and the economic elements. And this is represented in figure 7. movement
order
cultural model
hierarchization
s=social elements c=cultural elements orientations
production
distribution c
v.
Chapter Four
The movements that do not concern Jhemselves with their political influence are also those that are not revolutionary, that link the crisis of a social system directly to a messianic type of utopTa, or that try to launch a coup d'6tat from a totally unorganized action base. Any true social movement is reformist and revolutionary at the same time, recognizes ancTmakes use of the political system's existence, recognizes its limitations too, and constantly keeps the general line of its action outside and above the institutions, at the levels of class conflicts and historicity. The dominant class for its part also makes use of the political institutions, yet those institutions constitute a limitation to its hegemony. To think that institutions and politics are a vehicle for domination isi'simply to forget that domination manifests itself much more outside the institutional system, in what it rejects or forbids as well as in what it imposes. If sociology claims that what seems to be limiting or contesting hegemony is no more than that hegemony's mask, then it may well, in its turn, be accused of being a mere ruse—though a more subtle one—on the part of the dominant class. An absurd and infinitely receding game, but one that does not exist only in the imagination. The institutional system and its discourse are determined by the system of historical action and by class relations and class domination, but there is never any direct correspondence between the domination of the ruling class and political institutions. D.
The State
I have sought until nowr not to speak of the state. The word has barely occurred other than in a sentence here and there. This is because the state cannot in practice be confused either with the political system or with any one of its elements. The state is not a concept constructed by sociological analysis but a complex social agent, one whose action extends into the field of historicity, into the institutions, and also into social organization. a.
The Integration of Society's Functional Levels
The three broad levels of social reality are not superimposed directly one on top of another inside a collectivity that is the supreme actor, producing its own system of historical action, classes, institutions, and organization. Capitalist industrialization cannot be analyzed within a purely national framework, and the political system itself, though attached to a specific territorial collectivity, cannot be completely identified with that collectivity. Nevertheless, the separation that analysis is forced to introduce between social fields that in fact intersect more than overlay one another also brings oTrflhe"1mportance of the agents that bring them into relation with one another, inside the framework of the territorial unity. The state is the
The Political or Institutional System
217
principal of these agents. It is through the state that a social organization is defined and managed, limited by frontiers within which a legitimated authority is exercised through the decisions of the political system, and in which the social classes struggle for control of a system of historical action. And yet is not the state, in its turn, less an autonomous agent than the representative of the historical actors, of the social classes? In the majority of cases it does in fact appear to be linked to the ruling class, for would that class be ruling and dominant if there existed side by side with it a state in fact more powerful than itself, as it would be if it controlled the combined levels of society's functioning? In other cases the state seems to have been conquered by a popular social movement that succeeds in "taking power/' and its subordination is indicated by that of state dignitaries in relation to the leaders of the party, in countries where a communist party has triumphed. Is the state any more, in either of these cases, than the executive apparatus of those who are exercising social domination? This interpretation is very superficial. In the case of a popular revolution, the party in power becomes the state. This being so, it is no longer just a social movement but an agent managing a complex society, and at the same time a decider entering into intersocial relations with other states through war and diplomacy. The debates about the possibility of building socialism in a single country, and even more the acts of the socialist states, have shown clearly enough the gap that inevitably exists between a social movement and a state, especially in a situation of international crisis. To say that the working class is in power in such and such a country never corresponds to reality but rather pertains to state-produced ideology. This does not mean that socialist societies ought not to be defined primarily by the worker movement or the revolutionary action performed by and for a popular class. But it would be as false to say that the state is no more than the agent of the worker or peasant class as to say that the state exercises a definable power independently of the class movement that made its formation possible. When the state is linked with a ruling class, its autonomy is even more evident. Let it suffice for the moment to say that a ruling class is perpetually trying to establish its domination over society in as direct a way as possible and, therefore, to reduce intervention by the state, the latter's vigor always being greater as the power of the ruling class is less, or as the opposition of the popular classes is more active. Above all, the state's role is based upon the relative autonomy of the elements of the system of historical action in relation to class actions. Even if it is closely linked to a class or to a social movement, the state intervenes directly in the management of the agencies of historicity—for example, in a postindustrial society, in scientific and technical development Present within the field of historicity, yet not reducible to a social class,
218
Chapter Four
the state is also present in the political field. The state bears down upon the political system with all the weight of both the field of historicity and the social organization it represents. Bearing down upon it in its turn is the weight of the political system. State and political system are not two institutional subsystems, but the state is the locus of the institutional system s combination with the other social systems, the system of historical action, the class system, the organizational systems. This is something we sense clearly enough when we recognize that the liberal trilogy—legislative power, executive power, judicial power—is artificial. The state does not merely execute the decisions of the legislative, for it is also an administration on the one hand and an agent of historicity on the other. The state also intervenes, to put it mildly, in judicial power. If it is the political system's task to draw the boundary between the legal and the illegal or delinquency, then the state manages, generally very directly, everything that has been excluded in that process. It is an agent of repression. It ensures the reign of order, and, more than this, it keeps under its direct authority whatever may be deemed by institutional decisions to be a threat to order. Though the apparatus of justice may belong in certain of its aspects to the political system, the prisons and the police are the domain of the state, one into which the political actors venture very little and are always met by a lively resistance on the part of the state apparatus. These repressive agencies are not organizations; they are situated at the political level; they are the shadows that the light of the institutions keeps at bay, and the state is the master of those shadows. Lastly, ought we to identify state writh social organization? The state does intervene in that domain, most directly through its administration. More, the state is itself an organization, because it exercises an authority and because it conducts war and diplomacy. In times of war, society even seems to become identical with the state. It is mobilized, and neither class conflicts nor political activities can maintain their usual form within that mobilization. But even in this case the state is not solely the manager of a collectivity. It is much more the agent of the political system, of class relations, and of the system of historical action at the social organization level. Sometimes it intervenes in order to ensure that the decisions of the political system are respected; sometimes it is above all an instrument of the dominant ideology, which it seeks to transform into a consensus, in particular by acting through its means of socialization. To sum up, the state introduces political and organizational problems into the field of historicity, the problems of historicity and politics into social organization, and, finally, the problems of historicity and of social organization into the political field. It is both go-between and unifier. And this double role rests upon the very definition of its existence: it joins a field of historicity to a social organization via a political system; it joins a general system to a particular territorial collectivity. This is why the
The Political or Institutional System
219
study of the state has always been situated halfway between history and sociology, in a badly defined no-man's-land, yet one whose autonomy seems to be solidly established—that of the "political sciences,*' which deal in fact with knowledge of the state. For the study of the political system, of its functioning, and of its relations with the social classes on the one hand and with the administration on the other, falls clearly into the province of political sociology, whereas the state, which must always be defined in time and space, in its history and in an international conjuncture, belongs to a different kind of analysis in which the comparative method occupies a central position. This double role of the state has to be defined more precisely. On the one hand, the state unities society from the top downward, byinserting social organization within the framework of the political system and within the field of historicity. It stamps the practices of social life, which on the surface seem relative and changing, with the seal of the absolute, for it is the supreme power and, in Weber's famous phrase, holds the monopoly of legitimate physical violence. The very existence of the state is forever giving the lie to any purely "liberal" vision of society that sees it as a set of strategies, interests, and influences, all in competition but all constantly in a state of negotiation. Its role cannot be understood at the level of social organization itself; the orientations of the system of historical action and class domination become, via the political system, the rules imposed by a power. The state holds that power, which is in principle absolute and which manifests itself most clearly in the work of repression. The state is never more powerful than when it establishes a direct relation between what it calls values and the defense of a territorial collectivity faced with other such collectivities. On the other hand, the state is not the master but the last resort. It ensures the rise of problems and conflicts back up from social organization toward the political system, class relations, and the system of historical action. It is an instrument of integration and repression, yes, but it is also an agent of change: reformists try to make use of it in order to remedy imbalances and crises produced by a mode of social domination; revolutionaries try to seize it in order to transform society's orientations and class relations. These two roles do not balance one another and are not situated in the same analytical plane, but they are interdependent. In a synchronic analysis of society, the state appears as integrating and repressive, but its action does not ultimately result in the embodiment of a field of historicity, since a territorial collectivity is a complex social formation, a historical reality, and not a type or a sociological configuration. In this sense the state is not an instrument of reproduction but is always subject to a fundamental tension: between a historical unity and a sociological field. In a diachronic analysis, the state is an agent of social change, but one that
220
Chapter Four
tends to constitute a type of society as homogeneous, as coherent as possible, one that presents itself as bearer of a "model" of society. These two roles combine in very diverse ways, so diverse in fact that one is constantly tempted to introduce a simplifying principle into one's analysis of them, a temptation one must nevertheless overcome, as this chapter constantly tries to show. Is it not possible to say that integration and change are combined at that middle level of society formed by the political system, since it is there that laws are passed to integrate society and there too that the debates are held which can succeed in changing the laws? No, that is nothing but an optical illusion. For although the double movement that descends from historicity to social organization and then rises again from the latter to the former does pass through the political system in both directions, that political system cannot provide an account of it on its own. Moreover it is just as tempting to allow the political system no role at all as it is to allot it every role. Is it not subject to class domination; is it not powerless in the face of really grave decisions such as war, or merely in the face of the power wielded by the head of an enterprise? Nothing can dispense us from examining the complexity of the mechanisms by means of which the state's two great roles are combined—a fact that also shows the vanity of all research in the state's essence. Political philosophies are merely political or doctrinal creations. Study of the state can never either precede or command the study of society's functioning and that of the relations between the hierarchized systems that determine it. Inversely, the state can never be reduced to the role of agent for one social or political force. It never happens that a field of historicity, an institutional system, and a social organization overlay one another perfectly. Hence the role of the state in the process of change, but hence first its power and its capacity to resort to force and violence. The state is not solely the locus of communication between the various levels of society; it always has an autonomous apparatus and a specific capacity for action of its own. We shall see that the struggle for state power is the reason for the existence of the collective actions that I term critical actions in order to distinguish them from social movements. The state may even destroy all the social systems by imposing its hegemony upon them directly. b.
State and "Civil Society"
If the place of the state in sociological analysis is indeed as I have just described it, then the principal problem facing that analysis is to define the conditions and effects of the various forms of state intervention of social life. A couple of extreme images should suffice here. On the one hand we have the image of an integrating state that manages the system of historical action directly by intervening in the refations between
The Political or Institutional System
221
the classes and by substituting itself for them if needs be, that controls the political system directly and extends its apparatus to the administration of every sector of the social organization. A total state, one might call it, or even a totalitarian one. In the simplest cases—but probably not the ones nearest to reality—one can imagine that this integration might operate at one of the levels of social reality only. Society becomes an organization or a political system, or the form of the ruling class's domination. The all-powerful state would then dissolve into one of its functions. It is more interesting to consider the case of simultaneous integration on all levels of social reality in a state that is substituting itself for those levels. Such a situation signifies a complete dehistoricization, depoliticization, and disorganization of society, and consequently the deserialization of a society that has become the instrument of the state. In this case historicity is amalgamated with what is most removed from it, the "naturality" of the society, as in the case of Nazism, exalting race, the land, the Volk. The political system is no more than a shadow of itself, which is to say an association of mobilization with repression. Social organization is commanded by goals linked to intersocial relations: quest for power, for expression, preparation for war, which becomes the supreme goal of the state and which also leads it on to its ultimate collapse. This destructuration of society at the same time outlaws any process of change. This state has reached an ultimate form and cannot modify itself further except in terms of external pressures and its efforts to adapt to them when unable to dominate them. Such an outcome can only occur in a situation of general crisis within the social organization, of political crisis, and of impotence on the part of the social movements, whether of the ruling or the popular class. At the opposite extreme we find the image of the state as go-between, reduced to recording the interactions between the various social systems. This is the classic image of the liberal state, agent for the propagation of the system of historical action's elements, agent of the ruling class, striving to decrease the autonomy of the organizations and the weight of its own administration. A state essentially kept within the bounds of the political system. This state's moderation renders it subject to Hfe hisToricaTactors: ^class relations outweigh state intervention. The role of the state therefore depends upon the nature of those relations and upon that of the political system. If the latter is very open, then it will be permitted to implement a "welfare" policy directed at jofTsecurity and redistribution of wealth. Ideally, society becomes a political market, pragmatically managed, open to change but with a tendency for historicity to dissolve into strategies and transactions, so that political activity is largely directed to the search for unstable equilibria. If, on the contrary, the political system is "blocked," or has a low degree of
222
Chapter Four
openness, then the state's noninterventionism will accompany the hegemony of a more conquering style of ruling class, one that will itself take" oveFthe management both of the system of historical action and of the social organization, extending its ideology into all those areas evacuated by the state. The latter's role will then be to remove any obstacles to the action of the ruling class, to repress opposition to it, to ensure an openness and a mobility that are nothing but the mobilization of social resources for the benefit of the ruling class. The state ensures that there is liberty and equality, which means that it makes sure the well-fed and well-trained horse is able to run in the same race as the ill-fed horse brought in to the racecourse straight from the farmyard, and also that the ritual of the race shall be respected, that any protests aimed at pointing out the real inequality of this situation shall be discounted. More precisely, this state transforms class domination into stratification; it constructs categories of social practice but refrains from intervening—theoretically at least—in the way that men are assigned to the resulting streams and strata. It has only to leave social domination to do its work in order to transform equality into inequality, liberty into impotence. The role of the state is always situated somewhere between these two extreme positions: the total state that breaks off relations with "civil society," imposes its own interests and ideology upon it, imprisons it in immobility or aggression, and, on the other hand, the state that has been absorbed by civil society—subjected to the interests of the ruling class or, at best, to the conservative balance between social domination and social defense. c.
State Interventionism and Class Relations
The importance of the state varies between these two limiting extremes; it presupposes that the state will overflow the political system and penetrate into the field of historicity, but also that it will not destroy the relations between the system of historical action and class relations. Which amounts to saying that this autonomous role of the state depends above all on the nature of class relations. The state's role is small both when a rising ruling class is imposing itself, seeking to exert its domination directly on society as a whole, and also when the state is absorbed back into the political system, when the institutionalization of conflicts between already matured classes gains the upper hand. These two situations are both variants of the conjunction of a mainly ruling class and a mainly defensive class. In such situations the upper class has no need to shelter behind an autonomous state. At the very most it will make use of it as a means of sweeping away hindrances to its own initiatives. Now let us consider the other forms that class relations take, then examine in succession the following cases: (1) dominant class-defensive class, (2) ruling class-contestatory class, and (3) dominant class-contestatory class,
The Political or Institutional System
223
which constitute, together with the case already described (ruling classdefensive class), the simple forms of the double dialectic of the social classes. 1. The conjunction of a mainly dominant upper class with a mainly defensive popular class corresponds to a low degree of reference to the system of historical action. It is possible that in such a case the political system will play a primary role, but since this will involve its subjection to the hegemony of the dominant class it will already be subordinated to the state apparatus which is the expression of that hegemony. More important is the case in which the expression of class domination is direct dominion over social organization, in which social organization is mainly a set of agents for the reproduction of the established order. The state's role then increases in magnitude depending on how far the weakness of both ruling and contestatory classes signifies a crisis of historicity, and consequently the presence of "uncivilized" initiatives on either or both sides. Order cannot simply be reproduced, it must be maintained in the face of constant threats. This means that the state assumes an important repressive role, completed in its turn by a striving toward ideological integration, which becomes increasingly intense as the trends toward explosion become more visible. The state's action is thus displaced downward; it defines and imposes the categories of social practice; it proclaims values and norms, it promulgates rules, sets up authorities, recruits and trains the young and professional groups directly, imposes a religion and an ideology, makes a great show of separating those that have benefited from its training from those—the "bad"—who have not, and whom it excludes or imprisons. The colonial situation is the one in which this type of state develops most fully, above all when the colonialism involved is of the French type still to be found here and there to this day, specifically in the Antilles, where the capitalist interests are less strong than those of the double domination of an old dominant class and a state-centered administration. The role of the instruments of cultural domination, and especially of the school—though of the church too—is of extreme importance here. It is why rebellion is directed against the state-centered and ideological apparatus more specifically than against the economic domination. Uprisings are undertaken more in the name of the nation than in the name of a class whenever the dominating state is more visible than the ruling class. 2. The exact opposite of situation 1 is that in which a mainly ruling upper class is associated with a mainly contestatory popular class. Here, the confronting classes are relating their action directly to the stake of their struggle, to the system of historical action. They are engaged in a direct and
224
Chapter Four
open conflict, which leads inevitably to the explosion of the system of historical action, the elements of which are replaced by the sets of counterelements championed by each of the opposing classes. It might seem, at first glance, that this situation produces the maximum reduction of state intervention. Yet that is not the case at all, for such a confrontation presupposes a dynamic, open, very modernizing situation, which means both that the system of historical action is strongly constituted and that the political system is open. The state's action therefore consists in bringing the requirements of the system of historical action and the institutional mechanisms back together, in counterbalancing the class conflicts by an appeal for modernization and settlement of the conflicts. One can speak here of liberal intervention in the sense that there is no direct intervention in the area of class relations. This type of inten'ention also contributes to a maturing process of the class relations by reducing the importance of domination and defense. The state works toward the modernization of the ruling class, but also toward the mobilization of the popular class. The state intervenes with greater force if, because of the pressure of popular contestation, it is obliged to rescue society from a crisis that is the result of the upper class's inability to fill its ruling role. However, the state does not, for example, simply take over from industrialists who have become speculators; it gives a fresh impetus to economic activity and encourages the reorganization and modernization of the ruling class. It does intervene more directly when there is a stalemate equilibrium between an old and a new^ntling class so that neither of the two is actually ruling. This is Antonio Gramsdr's interpretation of caesarism. In every case, this state extends the "mobilization'* of society, thus providing itself with support in its struggle against the former patricians. The state puts its emphasis above all upon the progress of exchanges, of communications, of education. It therefore appears to be situated beyond class conflicts, for these are still only half-formed. 3. In the last conjunction, popular contestation clashes with an upper class that is more dominant than ruling, incapable of setting the system of historical action to work, more investment- and speculation-minded than productivist, more concerned with maintaining barriers than with orienting change. State intervention in this case is actuated by the efforts of the popular class to control the system of historical action. The most extreme form of this intervention is the conquest of the state by a revolutionary movement. A more limited form corresponds to a state action breaking up the dominant class as a response to popular contestation, assuring itself a role as ruling class, while leaving the original ruling class, renewed by this crisis, the possibility of resuming its ruling role later. Lastly, the state can be even more directly the agent responsible for the formation of a ruling class unable to
The Political or Institutional System
225
constitute itself without such intervention. Popular contestation is both made use of and repressed; a modernizing and authoritarian state, often capable of activating a paternalist populism, struggles to overcome its economic backwardness or underdevelopment, but for the benefit of a ruling class formed under its aegis, and one that can more easily be foreign than national. Many national histories have examples of transition from one type of state intervention to another. In Latin America, the national-popular state, which came into being in very different conditions in both Mexico and Brazil, has been transformed into a modernizing state acting hand in glove with large foreign enterprises and playing a repressive role, especially in the case of Brazil. It is therefore popular contestation that provokes the intervention of the state in the field of historicity. Inversely, it is the preponderant role of the dominant class that diminishes this state role, either by imprisoning it within the units of the political system or by imposing its hegemony on that system and using the state solely as an apparatus of integration and repression, which also drives it out of the field of historicity and turns it into an instrument of fusion between institutions and social organization, which combine to become the agent of the upper class's ideological domination. To sum up, the state may belong to one of three types when it is not totalitarian, when it does not substitute itself for society: (1) It can be almost entirely identified with the political system, (2) it can place itself at the junction of institutions and social organization, or (3) it can emerge from its base in the political system and penetrate the field of historicity. Each of these types corresponds above all to a modality of social change; they will therefore be examined in more detail at the end of the last chapter of this book. But we can at least name these change processes. I term liberal societies those in which the ruling class preponderates over the dominant class, societies not excessively weighed down by their pasts, by the dominion of former dominant classes; societies that are open, conquering. Such societies also are under the most direct control of the ruling class. In them, the state has above all an integrating, ideological role. It is the agent of values, that is, of the ideology of the ruling class. It intervenes in the social organization in order to make it submit to the decisions of a political system dominated by the ruling class, but from outside it rather than from inside. This state action is not carried on in the name of its ruling role or of its links with the ruling class. It is situated at the furthest remove from historicity and is concealed beneath idealist language. At the same time, the agents of the state are more rhetoricians than ideologists: social and cultural integration within the framework of a class domination, adaptation to economic and cultural changes, conduct linked with ascending or descending social mobility, all these are mingled in the discourse and the practices of an
j
226
Chapter Four
extremely professionalized state. But this integrating role is not separable from a repressive function which is exercised against "deviants" and against the contestation of the popular class. This state lends great importance to the work of socialization, of the inculcation of values and norms; it sees itself as exercising a moral, an edifying function. Contractual societies are those in which the former dominant classes bear down with the greatest weight, in which heterogeneity is greatest, in which the past has not been abolished by the present but in which there nevertheless exists a powerful ruling class. All the elements of the class conflict are mingled in them and tend at the same time to become fused with the debates of the political system, which is a locus for reforms, for transactions or accommodations, and oriented both toward change and toward stability. The state tends to be centered on this political system. Last, the voluntarist societies are those in which obstacles to change are strongest, in which change is not directly managed by a national ruling class. This means that the state penetrates into the field of historicity under pressure from a contestatory popular class. Sometimes it becomes the agent of that class, sometimes it imposes its power on opposed but composite classes unable to produce social movements, sometimes it turns on the popular class in order to set up a new ruling class under its aegis. It must be added, however, that this situation, characterized by the dependence of the society under consideration, brings together two opposing roles of the state. On the one hand the state is in the service of an external domination and plays a repressive role increased by the fact that dependence entails underemployment, serious economic imbalances, and also violent nationalist movements. On the other hand this state, dissociated from economic power, can easily be penetrated by political forces. Such "openness" of the state is one of the most characteristic aspects of many Latin-American situations. This state exercises a redistributive function, creating a following of "clients," partly among the middle classes, partly among the members of the "marginal" society that depends upon its gifts in order to subsist at all, and is the main basis for right-wing populisms such as the celebrated examples created by Riojas Pinilla in Colombia, Perez Jimenez in Venezuela, or Odria in Peru. But in both cases it is clear that the state is not simply the expression of a national ruling class, which on the contrary is "civilist" and is seeking to diminish state intervention in order to further its own hegemony over the political system and the social organization. When the state overflows the political system, then, it can occur in two opposite ways. When it is above all the agent of the upper class, then it acts
The Political or Institutional System
227
principally within the social organization, and this is what I have termed its ideological role. It integrates and it represses. When its intervention is governed by popular contestation, then it acts within the field of historicity: it is modernizing, "developmental." Each of these two types of state action can take weakened or degraded forms. When the domination is not imposed by force, it is exercised by social agents that add their own interests and representations to those they have been given the responsibility of transmitting or applying. Ultimately, constraint can be replaced by ritual, and the remains of old forms of domination fade into mere ceremonies. Inversely, state interventionism breaks down into institutionalization. The state is subject to the pressure of categories largely of the middle strata, who are seeking advantages or security. These two degraded forms of action can easily combine. The maintenance of the influence of old dominant classes may be associated with a politics distributing what are at least relative advantages to certain social categories. France certainly experienced a period of exhausted republicanism during which the old landowning bourgeoisie was defending the social and cultural order that suited it, while the new middle strata were gradually transforming into a defense of newly acquired vested interests what had originally been an impulse toward wider participation. For the world of education, at a remove from great national decisions and great political and economic interests, it is easier than for most sectors of society to become an area in which this double degradation of state action blossoms and admires its own image with satisfaction. But this decomposition takes more serious forms when the state intervention has been more powerful, when it has transformed the forms of social participation, class relations, and economic policies more profoundly. The nearer one approaches to the revolutionary state, the greater becomes the threat of a state absolutism that may go as far as totalitarianism. The state becomes dominant class and ruling class together. It transforms itself into a bureaucratic apparatus guaranteeing privileges to its own members instead of transforming the social organization. The total state, modernizing and revolutionary at the same time, bears within it the despotic state that imposes extreme constraints upon society for the benefit of a newly formed dominant class closely linked with the state. d.
The State, the Institutions, and Social Organization
Since the state is a liaison agent between the field of historicity, the political system, and the social organization, we ought to work out a set of propositions defining the attributes of the state not only according to the greater or lesser importance of the ruling class or the dominant class, or the defensive class or the contestatory class, but also according to whether the
228
Chapter Four
political system is more or less dynamic or blocked, and according to whether the social organization is stable or in crisis. Let us content ourselves here with defining the general effects of the state of the institutions and the social organization. 1. If the political system is dynamic, if institutionalization, in the two forms described earlier in this chapter, is strongly developed, then the state should intervene less in the relations between social actors than in the cultural domain, which is to say in the organization of the relations between society and its field of action. The state then plays an important role in historicity itself and in the "technical" or "professional" organization of social activity. A blocked political system, on the contrary, brings a large part of political relations and class relations back into the state. If the system becomes completely closed, then political life is replaced by rivalries between individuals, clans, cliques, and groups of interests within the state itself. The apparent power of the state, dominating the political system, in fact conceals hidden networks of intrigue and conflict. The most "practical" forms of social organization are dominated by the role they play in the retinues of a group of rulers within the state. The totalitarian state is also deeply fragmented. Goering and Himmler both created empires in certain sectors of the state apparatus and thereby within the social organization too, just as in Stalinian regimes the army or the police can become a state within the state. 2. If the social organization is stable, if it is not affected by serious crises, either in its internal functioning or in the domain of intersocial relations, and international relations in particular, then one can make the hypothesis that the state's role is mainly one of integration and therefore that the state's ideology is being increasingly developed, particularly in the domain of socialization. It is less a question of establishing coherent norms for society's functioning than of inculcating them in the citizens, and especially in the younger generation. The pursuit of consensus, the diffusion of values, these are the essential tasks of this integrating type of state. Serious economic or international crises. on the other hand, force the State into a more organizing role. It is mobilized by the urgent necessity of finding resources, of reestablishing equilibria, of providing security. But it must be added that this distinction between the integrating state and the organizing state is a "weaker" one than those introduced earlier, since the form this role takes is dependent upon the state of the political system and above all of class relations. A revolutionary state is usually coping with a serious crisis of the social organization, which may go as far as a foreign war, civil war, severe food shortage. Such a state cannot be purely organizing. But it cannot be defined as integrating at the social organization level. It is borne
The Political or Institutional System
229
by a social movement, which is a very different thing; it intervenes very forcefully in the field of historicity, and this intervention is directly associated with an organizing action, just as Carnot, the "organizer of victory," was associated with Robespierre and with all the social movements combined within the Jacobin action. There is no question here of constructing an ever more complex typology that would only prove to be a bad compromise between the pursuit of principles of sociological analysis and the direct knowledge of historical situations. What we are doing, on the contrary, is putting forward a few simple propositions that together will make it possible to account as succinctly as possible for the diversity of observable situations. e.
From State as Warrant to State as Ruler
Our analyses have been limited to a consideration of the state in its relations with the different social systems. But is this not to place ourselves in fact in a particular historical situation, and can one maintain this separation of state from "civil society" outside the limited framework of the industrialized capitalist societies that have introduced the separation of these two terms? The objection is not unfounded, but its consequences are less far-ranging than may at first appear. It leads rather to the differentiation of several components in the state's action//^ the types of society that precede industrialization the cultural model introduces a metasocial warrant for the social order. Historicity is not lived and thought as praxis, but as order established and maintained by a sovereign, by the state, an order which replaces the religious warrants of social order before itself being replaced by "economic" warrants, which finally yield in their turn to a purely "practical," scientific, and technical view of historicity. The state defines the order in which class relations are placed; at the same time it extends its dominion to the political system and social organization. But this does not mean that society is reduced to being merely the work of the state. The state is all-powerful in the realm of social reproduction, but it is also dominated by class relations and by the forms of social organization that resist its intervention. Its weakness is the other face of its strength. It does not direct social practice, it only establishes order. Not that this prevents it from intervening in class relations and politics. We must therefore distinguish inside this type of state what belongs to the societal state, the warrant of order, and what to the political statey generally speaking the integrator or go-between. It is a reversal of this situation that characterizes postindustrial society. Here the state intervenes in the field of historicity as an increasingly important component of the ruling class. This happens not only in so-called socialist countries, but also in societies that have remained capitalist in which the interdependence of state and the large enterprises is increasingly
230
Chapter Four
evident, as much when planning is mainly private as when it is mainly public. The state controls ever vaster areas of society as the production system imposes an increasingly integrated management of a technico-human whole. Everywhere, or almost everywhere, education, health services, and housing are the object of growing intervention by the state, while the state is mobilizing the ever vaster resources required by scientific and technical development and the search for power. Is this to say that the state can be reduced to its membership of the ruling class? Assuredly not, and the variety of types of postindustrial society forming before our eyes is a very convincing proof of this. Here again we must distinguish between two components of state action: the ruling state and the political state. This is why the growing role of the state in the economic management of society cannot lead us to think that class conflicts have been transcended and that the political system is no more than the instrument of state power. In the industrialized capitalist countries we are seeing rather a dissociation of the state apparatus. On the one hand the technocratic state that manages large organizations and intervenes in the functioning of others; on the other, a state whose role is determined by the situation of class relations and the characteristics of the political system and social organization. Between these two situations, pre- and postindustrial, the state is no longer a metasocial warrant of the social order but is not yet a manager of large organizations. This is why in industrial societies it is often identified with the political system. Such an identification is never acceptable. These different roles of the state do not simply succeed one another like the stages in some historical evolution. They combine in an invariably complex manner, so that the apparent unity of the state has to be broken down by sociological analysis. Let us look at the present French state. It retains many aspects of its former role as metasocial warrant. One addresses it as though it were the sovereign, expressing a respect and humility that are the recognition of its sacred nature. It maintains a preindustrial system of historical action whose most visible element is the type of organization that Weber termed bureaucratic. The rule is more important to it than the goal. Its rigidity, its sense of hierarchy, its division into superimposed quasi castes with almost no intercommunication—all these have often been described, sometimes with admiration but usually with irritation, for its archaism in an industrialized society is evident. But it is difficult to persuade the agents of the state that their social function is not reducible to "the general interest," that the great public bodies or the teaching profession are not above society, above its class relations and its political system, that they are not just pure professionals acting in the name of their proficiency and for the good of all, above and beyond private interests.
The Political or Institutional System
231
This grandiose and long out-of-date image is very far from corresponding to reality, however. This state-warrant has been sapped for some time by the change in society. The state as protector is often no more than a state as patronage, colonized by group interests and political forces that have become deposited in superimposed layers throughout its administration. This disorganization of the state is at once the contrary of its abstract rationality and its complement, the consequence of its nonadaptation to the society in which it is placed. Behind this state-warrant and this "politicized" state there also appears the state-manager, which itself has two different aspects. It is in the first place an interventionist state, developed by popular contestation, especially at the time of the Front populaire and at the Liberation, pressured by the unions, organizer of the joint production committees and Social Security. It is also the instrument of the modernization of the ruling class, first substituting itself for that class in order to reconstruct the country's economic superstructure, in order to create large production structures, then, as large capitalist production groups formed, associating itself with them in order to aid industrial development. In this managing role it was helped by its old role as warrant. The high stewards of state planning are the descendants of the great royal stewards, so that the technocrats had no trouble in occupying the places of a civil and military aristocracy more concerned with power than money. But this state also ensures the continuity of the ruling classes and of the instruments for the reproduction of social inequality. While modernizing the upper class it also maintains the old social and cultural barriers, without for all that giving up its role as agent for the defense of numerous group interests that are not part of the ruling class. It therefore plays four principal roles: warrant m odernizing
political dom inciting
Hence the constant ambiguity of the judgments passed upon it, for it is at the same time "Napoleonist" and "social-democratic," and these terms are in their turn confused also, for the Napoleonist state is at the same time the warrant of order and the modernizing agent of the new ruling class, whereas the social-democratic state is at the same time open to political pressures and a relay station for social domination. Those who attack the archaism of the present state are often also those who defend the interests of the new technocratic ruling class, whereas those who defend it find it easy to accept its role of social domination. Nothing could show more clearly the dangers of analyses that give precedence to the problems of the state, as though the state were the central
232
Chapter Four
principle of social activity, whereas its unifying role is always sufficiently limited to oblige analysis to give priority to a definition of the system of historical action, of class relations, of the political system, and of the forms of social organization before going on to define the roles and functioning of the state. f.
Conclusion
The state, insofar as it overflows the political system, produces a rhetoric that replaces social dialectics, the tensions between the elements of the various social systems, and the conflicts between actors, with an apparently "positive" discourse, but one that is forced to resort to arbitrary statements in order to reunite opposing or contradictory elements. The autonomy of this state rhetoric is greater as the society is more heterogeneous, as its political system is more bounded or more blocked, as the social organization is more in crisis. But it should also be said that although the state conceals society, it also gives society a unity that is more than merely constrictive. The state masks the tensions of the system of historical action, class conflicts, political interactions, but, because it links together all the levels of social reality, it has an extremely strong capacity for mobilization, it is the creator of community. This other face of the state is what modern societies term the nation. If the homeland is the identification of a field of historicity with a territorial collectivity identified with its values, then the nation, by contrast, is the mass upsurge of social organization to the level of historicity, and it is the state that beats the drums of the soldiers of the Year II, of the Red Army, or of those who fought in Viet Nam. In an age of large enterprises and large empires, of sciences and techniques, of strategies and growth, the nation still is more than ever, in all parts of the globe where essential social changes are being undertaken, the great force of social mobilization. There is no social movement of any scope that does not aim to breathe back life and creativity into the nation, and that is not powered by fhe Utopia of the state's absorption into the nation. But it is also this striving that gives the state more might, and that constantly creates the danger of dissolving the nation into mere subjects and transforming zeal into orthodoxy, into conformism, or into servility. Beside the state as rhetorician and the state as nation there also exists the state as dominator, placing itself above class conflict and the political system. It is against this state that protest movements form with the principal objective of "taking power," of seizing the state apparatus.Tt is a Tact tbat such a collective action exists, definable more directly by its relation to the state than in terms of conflict between social classes or the functioning of the political system. It even seems that "political" actors must always be defined by their relation to the state, since the latter is an agent of synthesis in social
The Political or Institutional System
233
life and represents the concrete unity of a field of historicity, a political system, and a social organization. Political parties are not actors in the political system only; they represent classes or fractions of classes or coalitions of classes; they also mobilize and defend demands arising in all sectors of the social organization. They therefore act on the state, shelter behind it, or combat it. This transcendence of political institutions by the political actors themselves enables us to dismiss the various utilitarianist theories, whether those of Bentham or Destutt de Tracy or those of the "incrementalists" in our own century. Law is based on something other than itself and the process of decision making. But beyond the law and the representation of particular interests, beyond the political system, there are two principles of unification that can intervene. First, the field of historicity, whether in the form of the system of historical action or the action of a class. The law and the political system as a whole rest upon a metasocial warrant of the social order or upon social development itself. They can also represent the dominion of the ruling class or, on the contrary, a popular movement overturning the institutions and taking power. The state is the other principle of unification. If we are dealing with the organizing state, the sovereign confronting other sovereignties, then this state domination is limited. But there is a constant tendency for these two transcendences to become confused. The confusion is purely doctrinal when the field of historicity is referred to as sovereignty of the people. What in fact is a "people"? Is it the consensus that Rousseau hoped would be expressed in referendums? But the confusion is much more serious when the state is identified with a class, with a system of historical action, or, more generally still, with the "march of history." The state is the supreme actor of history, the one at the center of wars, of revolutions, of economic transformations. But it is like a steward destroying the forces that have given him his power and reversing their purposes. The law can be transcended only by the opening of the field of historicity, by class relations, and by the tensions between the orientations of the system of historical action. When it is transcended by a principle of social organization, then society is standing on its head. It is probably impossible for the greatest and most admired upheavals to occur otherwise, for progress to have any agent other than absolute power, or any liberty other than despotism. At least we must remember that when the armies, the police forces, the "organic" intellectuals, and the state bureaucracy impose their will on society, what vanishes into the shadow of state power has only one means of survival and expression: the intelligentsia. It is the intelligentsia alone,
234
Chapter Four
protected by its ability and its proximity to power, even at the price of great suffering and usually long persecutions, which remembers that above the state, even above the law, there are class relations and historicity. The extreme visibility of the state apparatus and the political parties may give rise to a belief that the state is the central principle of society's functioning, that society is the work of the state, that conquest of the state means the creation of a new society. This is an illusion constantly present in all societies in which the political parties are more easily defined by their relation to the state than by their action upon the system of historical action, in which the "political0 constantly preponderates over the "social.VLet us therefore sum up what we have been saying. The state is not set above society; nor is it a pure instrument of unification of social practice for the benefit of the dominant class. Locus and agent of communication between the levels of social reality, it is always set within a mode of social domination but is not identified with it. So class conflicts are always more fundamental than struggles for control of the state, and parties are never the simple expression of social movements, and even less the agents of their formation. Reformist action, like revolutionary action, both of which correspond to different processes of social change, must never be confused with the social movements that are manifesting the class conflict in a given field of historicity, and that enter into relations with institutional pressures and organizational demands that are never entirely governed by the action of the parties and the struggle for the state. It is the priority given to the study of social structure over that of the state, it is the recognition of the system of historical action and class relations as fundamental determinants of social action that are the justification for my insistence on the absence of unity proper in state action, and on the necessity of breaking that action down in order to achieve a genuine sociological analysis and, more particularly, to reveal the nature of social movements.
SOCML ORGANIZATION
Introduction: Where Sociology and History Meet One is always tempted to represent social organization as the expression of a central principle, such as values or domination. An analysis conducted in terms of historicity, of the system of historical action, of class relations, takes us in a quite opposite direction. First of all, it recognizes within organizations the meeting of technique and power, concrete forms of the system of historical action and class domination, and distinguishes between different categories of organization according to their proximity to or distance from the field of historicity, which always imposes tensions and conflicts upon them. This in turn makes it necessary to conceive of organizations as systems of relations between simultaneously complementary and opposing elements, rather than as the work of an omnipotent power or of central values* It then shows how the practice of society, far from possessing a true unity, is nothing but the superimposition onto one and the same surface of all the levels of social reality. And this forces us to recognize that if social practice does have a certain unity, it owes it neither to values nor to the dominant class, but to the state. We must never look for unity at the level of concrete collectivities: their functioning is not a system. Only analysis enables us to isolate fundamental mechanisms in society. No collectivity is homogeneous, or entirely corresponds to a sociological type. We are in that no-man's-land here where sociologist and historian must bring their respective methods as close together as possible. The greater a society's historicity, the greater too is its heterogeneity. The acceleration of change does not modify all the elements of social and cultural 235
236
Chapter Five
life jointly. "Modern" societies present themselves as geographical wholes within which geological analysis will differentiate between formations belonging to different ages. It is true that these societies have an ever increasing capacity for action upon themselves, and that in consequence they are instituting increasingly profound upheavals in their heritage from the past. They tend to be defined by their present functioning rather than by their bonds with previous social forms; but this characteristic feature of modern societies only serves to reinforce their heterogeneity. Our societies are not content with using merely the coal or oil laid down in distant geological times; they also burrow down into past cultural deposits, where they find forms of authority, of family organization, of religious belief that do not simply vanish beneath the layers of change. And dominated societies, struggling for their independence and their development, depend even more on the support of their past, that is, on the reality of the life of their people, in order to mobilize that life against the dominant power. Hence the ambiguity of the word to which sociology ought to give the clearest meaning of all: society. We always have a tendency to view a sociopolitical collectivity as a society. We talk for the sake of convenience about French society, or American or Soviet society; and this is confusing and even dangerous if such expressions give rise to a belief in some direct correspondence, to an exact coincidence between a field of historicity, an institutional framework, and a territorial collectivity. This unity is not to be found at a social level proper; it can only be the work of the state, insofar as the state, as we saw in the previous chapter, acts in such a way as to link the field of historicity, the political system, and the social organization together. The important thing at the outset is to recognize the heterogeneity of social organization. This is something that can only be displayed by historical rather than sociological excerpting. There is nothing wrong in itself with the old exercise that history books used to be so fond of: a picture of France in 1610, or in the mid-nineteenth century. It can in fact be very useful as a means of showing that the social organization of a collectivity at any given date has no real unity, that a description of it is the opposite of a synchronic analysis. In the same way, the pictures provided by regional geography help to break down the surface unity of observable phenomena, as historical geography has clearly shown. Nothing could be more foreign to sociology than the search for the spirit of an age or for national psychologies. Such terms confuse real historical experience with sociological analysis. These generalizations, far from having an explanatory capacity, are merely clumsy attempts to keep up with historical change. The "spirit" of French society changes with that society. It is not a searchlight picking out the way ahead; it is at most the flickering glow of the red light on the caboose.
Social Organization
237
These remarks should not be taken lightly: they may help in the avoidance of conceptions less naive than those just referred to. Do we not often read studies of a society's "system of values"? I have already criticized this type of analysis and the use of the concept of values, which leads to the representation of society as the expression—the social organization—of cultural orientations, with class conflicts and political conflicts left out. But this procedure calls for a different type of criticism: it is presupposing in fact that a territorial collectivity, a historically and geographically defined whole, corresponds totally to a societal whole, to a field of historicity. — The rejection of such a representation leads at the same time to the elimination of another, apparently opposite, idea according to which the social organization as a whole is the concrete expression of a social domination. That a dominant class is exercising dominion over the whole formed by the social organization as well as over the political system is a proposition easily accepted, for it is practically tautological. What would a dominant class be if it did not dominate anything, if it were nothing but a powerful interest group, though acting upon a supposedly completely open market? One cannot speak of domination unless there is power involved, which is to say the capacity to determine the forms of social organization. But it is a long way from that scarcely contestable statement to the idea that a social organization is the concrete expression of the dominating power. And along that way we meet successively the system of historical action, which governs the nature of class domination and of class relations as opposed to being the result of its action, the capacity for action on the part of the popular classes, which are dominated but not entirely alienated, the relative autonomy of the political system, and lastly the even greater autonomy of the social organization as complex historical datum. We must therefore, if we are to avoid all confusion at the outset, accept at least temporarily that a particular social organization is not a system, is not a coherent whole, all of whose parts can be defined by their interrelations, so that any modification introduced at any point of the whole would entail systematic modifications to all the components of that whole. We began with historicity and the system of historical action, which is to say the action exercised by society on itself, before introducing the theme, quite as fundamental as the first, of class conflicts. On that level one is dealing with systems that are not controlled, ruled, managed. There is no power that keeps them in order, even though the system of historical action, like the system of social classes, naturally tends to react against imbalances and crises. It is not until we reach the institutional or political level of our analysis that a concrete society, and thus a decision system, can be introduced. One has onlv to continue in the same direction in order to encounter—on
238
Chapter Five
the level of 4,social organization," of the practice of a historically defined society—particular units that we shall have to call organizations, formed for the pursuit of specific goals, directed by a power that establishes forms of authority and determines the statuses and the roles of the various organizations' members. An enterprise, an administration, a hospital are all organizations, but a national society can also be analyzed with the aid of this concept. An organization therefore has two faces. It is situated within a societal whole, which is to say within a field of historicity and a political system. It also occurs in a historical situation—and a geographical one—the analysis of which lies to some extent outside sociology. 1. The organization is not a primary datum for analysis. A capitalist industrial enterprise is not the work of an entrepreneur whose action could be explained in socially indeterminate terms, by the spirit of innovation, the will to profit, or as a reaction against poverty. It is nothing more than a concrete and particular manifestation of a system of historical action and class relations. It is also an activity regulated by decisions emanating from the political system. The power of the manager of an organization does not rest upon his authority within that organization; on the contrary, his authority is founded upon his power, which is the application within the organizational framework of his ruling and dominant role as an element of the upper class. An organization can never be defined solely by its relations with the environment. Such a definition is no more than the ideology of organizational power. Every organization possesses a certain dominion over at least a part of the environment. Just as no school responds exclusively to the demands of its pupils, so no firm responds purely to the demands of the market. Both, in different ways, have the capacity to impose their own objectives on the environment. 2. But an organization is also a decision-making unit set in a historical environment. This means two things. First, the one already mentioned. An organization does not belong to a field of historicity only. It acts by making use of available resources in a given historical situation. Managers and managed are burdened with behavior and representations inherited from the past. This is something particularly visible in organizations with a socializing role, such as schools. Secondly, an organization is a decision center that acts in relation to other decision centers. All organizations, not only state organizations, have intersocial relations dominated by war and diplomacy. The more autonomous the decision center, the more importance problems of war and peace have for it. The objectives of survival, conquest, power, can never be analyzed independently of the field of historicity and the political system in which they
Social Organization
239
occur, but nor can they be reduced to the mere functioning of a society. It is illusory to view international relations as social relations within a global society; similarly there always exist intersocial relations to some degree between organizations, relations of competition, of alliance, of aggression, of negotiation. Nothing could emphasize better than these elementary observations the gap that separates this analysis of organizations from a general conception of social orgahTzafion7The further one moves from the field of historicity, the more the system's unity fragments, the more social relations give way to strategic relations. It is never possible to reduce the behavior of an organization to one of the levels of analysis; it is set in one or several fields of historicity and hence in the same number of cultural models and sets of class relations; it exerts an influence within a political system; it acts upon a market and creates a strategy and intersocial relations for itself. The relations between great powers cannot be reduced to a class struggle at international level; nor can they be fully analyzed without reference to class relations within a system of production. Finally, it may help to restate clearly the use made in this book of words that are often employed interchangeably in everyday language. I have no right to impose definitions, but 1 owe it to the reader to try to avoid confusions or obscurity. Sociological practice—of mainly functionalist inspiration—has led increasingly to the use of the term "institutions" for what I call organizations. Moreover, we are constantly referring in everyday life to associations or even to social movements as "organizations." I have called "institutions" the legally regulated forms of legitimate decision making. I call "organizations" those collective units of action utilizing specific categories of resources, fulfilling a legitimate function, and managed by a specific mode of authority. What I call "associations" are voluntary groupings formed in order to act upon the political system, class relations, or the system of historical action. I shall therefore not speak of economic or academic "institutions" when referring to businesses or schools, but shall use the word "organizations"; I shall not speak of political, or union, or religious "organizations," but of "associations." I shall, however, speak of the organization of enterprises or of political parties or of religious activities, since it seems to me that the distinction to be made is clear enough in any particular context. A. The Organizational System An organization is not the result of an arbitrary cross-sectioning of social activity, as would seem to be implied by muddled expressions such as: the
240
Chapter Five
political, economic, or educational organization of a country, but a set of means governed by an authority with a view to performing a function recognized in a given society as legitimate. a.
Dimensions
A society's field of historicity is formed of a system of historical action and class relations. The orientations of the system of historical action—cultural model, mobilization, hierarchization, needs—can be defined independently of class relations, though it must always be remembered that those relations determine the social control of the system of historical action. Such a separation is no longer possible at the level of organizations; just as it was not possible even at the level of the political system. Within the framework of an organization, a power is exercised over the management of certain social resources. This power of management is not separable from class domination; those resources and their utilization are not separable from the system of historical action or, more precisely, from its social elements— mobilization and hierarchization. The power defines an organization's objectives and its norms. These latter are never purely technical, and resist reduction to social utility defined by a form of production. The objective of a capitalist enterprise is certainly to produce consumable goods or services, but it is also and equally to produce a profit. An educational organization produces human beings certified to possess certain knowledge or the capacity to perform certain tasks, but this objective is not separable from the function of recruitment into the social classes or from that of the reproduction of social inequalities. It is impossible to reduce education to professional training, as though it were situated simultaneously above and below class relations without any participation in them. By power, therefore, I mean the projection onto an organization of a class domination legitimated by the political system. Power is not reducible to authority, a specifically organizational concept, or to influence, a concept that belongs in an analysis of the political system. In a production organization, shop stewards may win a certain authority, even though that authority is not institutionalized. Union representatives may also acquire a certain influence and affect or even impose decisions. But they generally know that they have not attained power and, more concretely, that their action is always situated in relation to a legitimated domination from which they are excluded. They must therefore oppose that domination with the force of a social movement, mobilized by consciousness of a conflict of power. An organization is never solely a system of cooperation. Violence and the relations of force are always present in it and cannot be reduced to pressures exerted on
Social Organization
241
the decision system, for power is not the product of the decision system; rather it is what defines that system's limits, as we have already seen in our analysis of the institutions. The forms of organizations, and the norms that govern their functioning, are manifestations of the orientations of the system of historical action. It is possible to follow the transition from one system of historical action to another as one moves from the rational-legal, state-type of organization on to the pursuit of productivity by the so-called scientific organization of labor, then on again to the goal-oriented organization of the most modern organizations. Any organization therefore yokes together a power with a resource, a class domination with a form of labor. Any organization that could be wholly defined in terms of the power exercised within it, without encountering any instrumental constraint, whether technical or commercial in nature, would cease to exist as such. This case does exist; it is that of organizations that perform no labor, like a prison or, to a certain degree, a hospital. I shall return to that case, but it is clear for the moment that it cannot really be counted here as an organization. It is still more difficult to imagine purely technical organizations. And here it must be made clear that the power in an organization is not always exercised directly, as in the case of an enterprise with economic goals inside which that power is embodied in a "boss." A hospital or a university also uses social resources in terms of a mode of social domination, even though those who exercise authority inside them may be unaware of it. The second oppositional pair that defines the functioning of an organization has been briefly referred to. An organization has an action simultaneously inside and outside itself. On the one hand it defines its objectives and organizes exchanges; on the other, it establishes norms and maintains its equilibrium, which is to say the relations between its parts that are compatible with its integration and with the pursuit of its objectives. It is through its^objectiyes that the organization belongs most directly to a society, that it depends, in other words, on a field of historicity and a political system. Inversely, the problems of internal equilibrium are ultimately definable in terms of the ordering of its means and without reference to the higher levels of analysis. The production flow will demand that certain internal equilibria be maintained in order to avoid bottlenecks or the underuse of some part of the production apparatus. Socially, this also reminds us that every organization must provide a certain congruence of statuses. When the same work is carried out by people whose remuneration differs markedly, a serious organizational crisis will follow and a feeling of injustice or inequality on the part of the disadvantaged which will exacerbate other internal grievances throughout the organization.
242
Chapter Five
The preceding observations lead us to recognize that an organization is always simultaneously dependent and autonomous. It is dependent upon both technical constraints and social objectives, but it is autonomous in that it is a decision center that can establish exchanges with the outside as well as internal norms of functioning. This autonomy may be very restricted, in particular in the case of administrations with the responsibility for executing political decisions. The image of the enterprise, on the other hand, particularly a commercial or financial one, would seem to offer a great independence of decision. But it is impossible to imagine an organization that is either entirely dependent or entirely autonomous. b.
Elements
The combination of these three oppositional pairs leads us to define the elements of the organizational system in the manner presented in figure 25. An organization is the whole formed by the means of management bringing objectives and technical resources into relation. But what figure 25 attempts to clarify is that an organization is not simply the adaptation of means to goals. The elements of the system are linked to one another by two types of relation. external
power
objectives
technique
exchanges Z>*^
internal
^ ^
equilibria
Figure 25
1. In the first place, each of the elements stands in opposition to the three others on two of the constituent axes of the system. This situation, the same as that found in the system of historical action or the political system, shows clearly that a social system is not governed by a central principle, by a system of values, a type of interest, or a spirit. It is even more indispensable that we should be reminded of this here than in the other cases, for the system of historical action cannot easily be identified with an actor—even though Society is still much too often talked about as though it were a will—whereas it is tempting to analyze organizations immediately in terms of actors, usually in order to identify them with their managers. An organization should first of all be defined as a system. This system has no center, so that there is no one principle unifying the elements of its functioning. An organization, like a
Social Organization
243
political system, cannot function successfully unless it has a way of managing broadly opposing demands. For the pursuit of certain objectives is always in tension with the maintenance of the internal equilibrium, as also with the establishment of norms of functioning and even with the conduct of exchanges with the outside world. These tensions can be best displayed by replacing the diagram of the organizational system by its opposite, which is to say by a typology identifying each of the system's elements with a type of organization. In this way one could distinguish between productive, commercial, management, and technical organizations. Organizations of the first type would be governed by their objectives, by their will toward the attainment of certain goals, to increase their production, their profits, or their power. Those of the second type would be guided above all by concern with their exchanges with the outside and therefore with their constant adaptation to an environment, a market in a permanent state of change. Those of the third type would give more importance to administrative management or to what is commonly referred to as organization, which is to say to their internal functioning. Organizations of the fourth type would be concerned above all with their technical and professional coherence, and with the efficient arrangement of their instruments of production. Such a typology holds little interest, for all our effort has been directed to showing that no organization can exempt itself from responding simultaneously to all four kinds of exigencies. It does, however, indicate how divergent those exigencies are, and makes it possible to throw light on certain tensions that set different departments or different groups of actors in opposition within the same organization. Technicians, brokers, administrators, and managers all tend to give priority to one of the elements of the organizational system. 2. But the interdependence of the elements and their oppositions should not make us forget their hierarchical relations. No organization exists other than in relation to objectives, to goals. An organization cannot be reduced to a set of means put at the service of objectives defined entirely from the outside. Even a public administration possesses a certain capacity to define its objectives, to work out a ''policy." The unit that does not possess this capacity ought to be termed an establishment, meaning that it cannot be isolated from the larger whole of which it forms part and which does possess a certain autonomy of decision. An enterprise, a firm, is an organization, a factory is no more than an establishment. A secondary school is simply an educational establishment, but the French Ministry of Education is an organization. Adaptation to the environment and internal administration are the means by which objectives are realized and which in consequence determine the nature of the technical means to be employed—means always
244
Chapter Five
possessing an autonomous reality, imposing specific constraints, which must be taken into account in the fixing of the objectives but which certainly do not form the basis on which the organization is constituted. This hierarchy of the elements, which may be represented graphically in following way: objectives exchanges
norms equilibrium
makes it clear above all that the organizational system can never be isolated from the hierarchy of social systems in which it occupies the lowest place. This subordinate position obviously does not indicate that organizations are in any way lacking in importance, for it is impossible to think of a society without enterprises, without schools, without administrations, and so on, at least in the differentiated societies with which we are dealing. It means that a society is not an aggregate of organizations negotiating their political relations in order to succeed in constituting a certain type of overall society. The whole formed by the organizations puts into practice, beyond the particularities specific to each of them individually, social and cultural orientations, and class relations, governed by a political system. c.
Continuity and Innovation
The system of historical action and the system of class relations have been defined as systems without centers. There is no authority that manages them or controls the boundary between inside and outside, so that several systems of historical action or of class relations can be mixed and combined within a single territorial society. The political system is relatively "open," since it is upstream from the legitimate decisions that are the output of its functioning, but it is also bounded in that it corresponds to a political unit and exercises its sovereignty over a well-defined social whole. An organizational system is closed: it is downstream from those decisions, it possesses precise boundaries within which an authority is exercised and rules are applied. Its leaders therefore have the attributes of power, which is to say the capacity to make peace and war outside and the twin capacity of integration and repression inside. No organization exists that does not possess both formal and informal mechanisms of integration and socialization. Certain types of conduct are expected of members of an organization, and deviants are punished or excluded in accordance with procedures over which the organization has control. These terms are only excessive if one is thinking of social units that are not solely organizations but are also political systems, and in whlcE popular social movements occur that can stand up to and retaliate against
Social Organization
245
the organizational authority/We shall consider in a moment the superimposition of various social systems within one organizational framework. But it has to be recognized that no organization can be entirely institutionalized, in other words, politicized, without disappearing. One can imagine a society in which all the organizations^ have been transformed into voluntary associations, butfn fact one is more likely to find that the voluntary associations also have organizational aspects and thus rules and sanctions of their own. This is why if is difficult to imagine an organization without a mode of remuneration. Wages, whatever the name actually used for them, are the principal means of integration and sanction. Whoever can display most of whatever it is that is most favored by the organization, whether it be productivity, seniority, or qualifications, receives a higher remuneration, and whoever is to be punished is deprived of all or part of his wages. An organization has mastery over the definition of its criteria of selection, of promotion or demotion, and of redundancy, even though that power may have limits set to it by law or by a collective contract. The organization's power is more visible in the state seen as an organization, but it would be artjficial to establish a difference in kind between private and public organizations, or between organizations with specific aims and societal organizations. Every organization is in some way a state. This power is large and visible because the organization as state is a complex historical unit many of whose elements are not really integrated. Hence the autonomy of the state in relation to a societal type; hence too the autonomy of an organization's managers in relation to a mode of production. An organization does not live solely in a society but also in the midst of events that it produces and experiences. Perhaps this is what enables it to transcend the tensions and the elements that constitute it. The manager of an organization has sometimes been represented as an arbiter who listens, conciliates, negotiates, and is constantly concerned with adaptation and integration. This image had the merit of making it easy to grasp the problems of the organization as a system, and to move beyond the old image of the entrepreneur at the very moment when the central importance of large organizations in the advanced industrial societies first became clear. But it is also an image as inadequate as that of a purely conciliatory government would be. The statesman, the manager of an organization, is in the first place that person who upsets equilibria and rules, who defines a policy, who conceives objectives before considering with a member of his cabinet or his board of directors the best way of reducing the tensions created by the upset. An organization deprived of innovation is directly menaced with being increasingly absorbed in the resolution of the inevitable tensions between the various elements of its functioning. On the other hand, it is impossible for an organization to take initiatives if
246
Chapter Five
it has no way of managing its tensions. I am speaking here not of its conflicts—those created by grievances, institutional pressures, or social movements—but simply of the tensions that occur between the four elements: objectives, norms, exchanges, and internal stability. This interdependence of the capacity for initiative and the management of tensions lies at the heart of the problem of organizations, for it expresses their double nature: they are specific units of action and they belong to a field of historicity and to a political society. They are at the same time system and unit of action. This is one of the reasons why an organization can never completely transform itself into a political system, never be reduced to the organization of cooperation. It must be a management unit, in order to respond to the constraints of the environment and of its own production apparatus. Knowledge of those constraints, and the handling of them, always imposes a concentration of the capacity for decision, whatever the social mode of determination of the objectives and the nature of the political transactions within the organization. The other reason is not connected with the effect of techniques but with those of power, which is to say class relations. Sometimes the dominion of the ruling class is direct. The functioning of capitalist enterprises is governed, at a level transcending the particular units of production, by the formation and maintenance of capitalist profit. Sometimes it is more indirect, passing through the intermediary of the state, and therefore of sociologically more heterogeneous coalitions. Urban administrations cannot be understood if one dissociates them from their role of maintaining and reinforcing class distinctions and inequality. The fact that certain organizational units are also the locus of a particular political system does not in any way permit us to conclude that we are witnessing a "transition from organizations proper to organizational systems" as it is expressed in the terminology of Crozier, who calls organizational systems what I term political systems. "The simple and rigid organizations of the past, based upon a constrictive model imposing defensive gambits," writes Crozier, "are giving way slowly to more flexible and complex organizations based on a model of cooperative play. While these systems are becoming increasingly flexible and regimented, organizations are becoming increasingly flexible and open like political systems" ("Sentiments, organization, et systemes," Revue francaise de sociologies no. 5, 1971, p. 148). Two distinct orders of fact are confused here. First there is the correct observation of the transition from organization by rules to organization by objectives, and the transcendence by social practice of the type that Weber termed bureaucratic. But this in no way implies that the functioning of modern organizations is drawing closer to that of an open political system. Need I make the point that management by objective has received its most
Social Organization
247
spectacular applications in the area of military operations? The amalgamation of organization and institution is nothing but the application of a social ^ ideology that wishes to see all social relations as being entirely capable of institutionalization, so that power becomes no more than influence, and ' domination is denied. The distance between organizations and institutions, and the former's autonomy, is governed both by the existence of technical and commercial constraints and by the projection onto the organization of the domination of the ruling class. d.
Crises of the System
The structural tensions of the organizational system have to be mastered, yet they never can be so entirely. Every organization is always threatened by crisis. And the concept of crisis has the same meaning here as in the earlier analysis of historical action, or of the political system, or even of the system of class relations. A crisis is the breaking of one of the system's axes. The one most often described is the rupture between outside and inside, between objectives and norms, exchanges and technical equilibria. In a producer organization it can take the form of a dissociation between commercial and financial policy on the one hand and administrative and technical management on the other. In today's universities there is likewise a great difficulty in reconciling certain social functions—defined both by the educational demands of those accepted and the training requirements of the world they will be entering—with internal exigencies involving both the creation of new knowledge and the organization's functional norms. If crisis leads to explosion, then the organization breaks down. On the one hand it closes itself off inside its internal problems, thereby isolating itself from its environment; on the other, it engages in initiatives that are no longer sanctioned by the capacity to engage the entire organization: the administration no longer follows. The nature of this crisis, as of the others, can be more exactly defined if we present the organizational system as in figure 26. The separation of outside and inside brings with it to begin with a confusion between objectives and exchanges. The objectives become autonomous, since they are no longer imposing themselves upon the functioning of an organization. They are reduced to a will to conquest. In the opposite direction, the exchanges are unbalanced by this crisis and are no longer anything but submission to external constraints. The action turned toward the outside thus becomes a mixture of arbitrary initiatives inspired by the spirit of conquest and a very dependent and very arduous adaptation to external constraints. The picture here is of a power detached from an organization, for example, a state power no longer restrained by norms and equilibria, or of an economic power en-
248
Chapter Five
Outside dependence
power
Inside autonomy
autonomy
dependence
objectives equilibria
exchanges
technique
Figure 26
gaging in speculation rather than the orientation of a production organization. Parallel to this, the norms, detached from the objectives, can no longer be based on anything but the pursuit of the organization's survival, while the equilibrium of the apparatus governing the organization's functioning explodes and is replaced by the internal exigencies of each of the whole's components, by the predominance of specialization. Figure 27 shows what one might term the counter-elements of the organizational system. All forms of crisis end up by replacing elements of the organizational system with counterelements. These counterelements, instead of combining into a system of their own, instead of being simultaneously opposing and complementary, are contradictory of each other. Conquest is in contradiction to constraints, as concern for survival is to specialization.
dependence
Outside autonomy
power
objectives
conquest
technique
constraints
exchanges
Inside autonomy
dependence
norms
survival
specialization
equilibria
Figure 27
The break between inside and outside brings with it the dissociation of the elements belonging to each of the two halves thus torn apart. The other types of crisis have the same effects. The rupture between power and technique, between ends and means, gives greatest importance to the contradictions between conquest and survival on the one hand and between constraints and specialization on the other. The instrumental components of the organization are at once forced back upon themselves and subjected to a passive adaptation to the changes of the environment, while power no longer
Social Organization
249
has any reason for being except its own reproduction. The striving for conquest is motivated not by objectives but by the ever greater difficulties involved in ensuring its survival, a flight headlong into disaster accentuated by the disorganization of the instrumental means. The further an organization's center of power is from its executive departments, the more likely this crisis is to occur. It is a constant theme in descriptions of military campaigns. The technical problems and the relation to the enemy impose themselves with obvious force, while objectives and norms are fixed on a very different level. The particular sensitivity of the army to these problems explains why the army was one of the first large organizations to do its utmost to shorten its chains of command and adopt management by objectives. Lastly, the dissociation of dependence and autonomy brings with it the dissociation of constraints and survival on the one hand and of conquest and specialization on the other. This crisis is perhaps the most profound, since an organization, before being defined at its own level, must first be defined by the place it occupies in the hierarchy of social systems. Being a particular decision center and the locus of implementation of the field of historicity and the political system, it can hardly survive the dissociation of these two aspects of its nature. This crisis occurs particularly within an organization that is at the same time inserted in an administrative system and given the responsibility of production tasks that render it analogous to a private enterprise. It cannot combine two such opposite logics—its dependence and its autonomy. As a response to all these crises, an organization cannot simply resort to a stronger integration of its elements, since the crisis arose from their disintegration. It is therefore faced with three solutions: either it moves closer to the levels above itf transforming itself into a simple agent of social control, thus being absorbed into the political system, which might be termed the administrative solution; or it strives to win the right to fix its objectives and norms at the lowest possible levels, by decentralizing decision making and broadening the scope of initiatives permitted at the bottom; or, last, it transforms itself into a veritable state within the state, into a sovereign power, into a "body" concerned with asserting its privileges, outlawing external pressures, and having its own disorder recognized as order. B.
Administrations, Enterprises, and Agencies
The organizational system as it has just been described defines a level of sociological analysis and not a set of directly_observable_social units. But if, instead of moving downward from field of historicity to organizations, one follows the opposite path, then it is no longer possible to encapsulate all organizations within the same formula. For certain of them are directly attached to the political system and do not participate in class
250
Chapter Five
relations or the system of historical action except via the intermediary of the political system, in other words, indirectly. These I term administrations. Others, on the contrary, are directly linked to class relations, while being political units. These are enterprises. Still others participate directly in the system of historical action, while also passing through class relations and the political system. For them 1 have employed the term agencies. An administration cannot possess a political system or class relations of its own. It is purely an agent for the execution of institutional decisions. An enterprise, on the contrary, because it is directly linked to class relations, itself becomes a political locus; it is at the same time an organization and an institutional system. In the same way an agency is at once an organization, an institutional system, and an actor in class relations. administrations
* institutional system
enterprises
•* institutional system
-
class relations
agencies
- institutional system
•
class relations
system of historical action -"~~~ Figure 2&
In every case analysis in terms of organizational system is applied in the same way, but as one moves from administration to agency, so this analysis ceases to describe the whole functioning of the entity under consideration and concerns itself with one of its levels only. a.
Administrations
An administration is created by the sovereign, by the political system. Administrations form a whole that constitutes not the state—which is much more than a societal organization since it reaches across the whole of society and provides a more or less solid link between field of historicity, political system, and organizations—but the state's apparatus of execution. If the state is reduced to its administrative apparatus, it is often said that jt is bureaucratized, which is to say that it is no longer anything but the implementation of the decisions of a political system, itself more or less completely subject to a class domination and the orientations of the system of historical action. Administrations correspond to what Amitai Etzioni terms coercive organizations in his Modern Organizations (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964). They are the apparatus of social control. This term points up the central problem of any administration. An administration has a tendency to cease being a true organization, to become reduced to a means for the
Social Organization
251
application of political decisions and of the juridical texts that express them, and therefore to lose its technical dimension, that is, the two elements— exchanges and equilibrium—that are just as much constitutive of the organizational system as are objectives and norms. It is even questionable that we ought still to speak of objectives. In certain cases an administration is reduced to the application of internal norms. This is the case with repressive administrations and a great majority of total institutions. This term, used by Erving Goffman {Asylums, New York: Anchor Books, 1961), denotes organizations that totally enclose a population that leads its social life wholly within them and is thus entirely subjected to an authority that regulates all its activities. A hospital, an asylum, a prison, a boarding school, a hostel or home, a military camp, a ship at sea, and even a company town are among the best known examples of total institutions. This type of organization experiences a permanent crisis arising from the dissociation of power and instrumentality. And this is further aggravated when the norms become isolated from its objectives, action directed in toward the interior of action directed toward the exterior. Such administrations are therefore criticized for being inefficient, incapable of adapting themselves to their environment, and finally for not really being managed at all. The French are quite accustomed to this type of experience; they think they are dealing with a public administration, and when they penetrate it, as one of its "patients" as it were, they are amazed to encounter nothing but a tangle of obligations, to find that the elements of the administrative whole have no communication among themselves, that a decision is made in the name of the rules and without any consideration of the effects on the management of the administration itself. Such an administration shuts itself away in secrecy because its objectives are defined above it and because its exchanges with the environment are all one way. Its internal equilibrium no longer has any meaning in the absence of all technical autonomy//All administrations are not of this type. Many make use of the techniques imposed by the manipulation of complex ensembles, have a certain capacity to define their objectives, at least on the operational level, and even direct their relations with a material and social environment. This is the case with the army, for example, and more generally with other administrations more directly linked to the state as I have defined it. The domination of norms tends therefore to become weaker, as one finds when the army is active, that is, in wartime, and the organization tends to assign itself wider and wider objectives, until it begins to stretch the bonds that keep it in subordination to the institutional system and the field of historicity./TJltimately this leads to the creation of total organizations, which are the complete opposite of total institutions and tend to behave as societies, or at least to assign themselves values of their own, a "spirit," and a high degree of technicality.
252
Chapter Five
But then the administration tends to become an agency, or at least to feel itself, like an agency, to be the depositary of a society's cultural model. An ill-founded pretension, since it is "forgetting" all that lies between and separates the system of historical action and the organizational system, in other words class relations and the political system. Such total organizations are in practice identifying values and instrumental action, requiring from their members a moral integration and a consensus that are incompatible with recognition of the fundamental conflicts of orientation and with the organization of a system of negotiations and influence. What is not recognized becomes deviant or clandestine. The political system finds its way back in the form of clans and cliques, at the top of the organization at least, and conflicts of interest are expressed in unofficial going slow, absenteeism, high turnover of personnel, theft or sabotage, and, more generally, by the formation of defensive informal organization that ends up by being tacitly recognizee^/ Every administration can be situated between these two extreme limits: the total institution and the total organization, extreme dependence of institutional decisions and the illusion of complete independence with relation to the political system and class relations. In the total institution, disorganization is extreme, since a single one of the elements of the organizational system—norms—is invading the territory of all the others. In the total organization, on the contrary, what appears is a superorganization with compensating resistance mechanisms. Superficially these two types have common attributes, and this is what leads us to speak in both cases of bureaucracy: resistance to change, incapacity to deal with demands coming from either inside or outside. But this resemblance is no more than superficial. It is better not to speak of bureaucracy except in the case of total organizations, and to term the functioning of the total institutions disorganization. The total organization strives to sever the bonds of dependence that keep it in subordination to the political system and the field of historicity, and its aspirations to becoming an agency can only reinforce this isolation. The result is that such an administration can experience only a process of involution as it changes. Class relations and political relations are no longer experienced as anything but organizational problems, as forms of dysfunction, which authority strives to eliminate by the imposition of new rules, further constraints, which in turn provoke a stepping up of withdrawal conduct, of evasion tactics, or of passive resistance. Increasingly, organization devotes the essential part of its activities to digging itself deeper and deeper into this vicious circle of constraint and resistance. What renders the situation intractable is the stubborn insistence on treating problems as organizational that in fact are not so. Bureaucratization is the breaking down
Social Organization
253
of class relations, of the orientations of the system of historical action, and of political relations into nonmanageable elements of organizational functioning. Any individual problem becomes confused and impossible to deal with because it presents itself in an undifferentiated way: officially what is involved is a purely organizational, concrete, limited problem that would seem to be just a matter of interpreting regulations or sorting out some technical point; but as soon as it is tackled, it turns out to involve inadmissible conflicts of interest and procedural methods not recognized by the system of decision. To deal with this new set of problems it would be necessary to go outside the organizational system, to go up at least to the institutional level. But this the total organization refuses to do, since it is so deeply entrenched in its inordinate pretensions to independence and selfsufficiency. Such an organization can simply be fragmented by its own internal difficulties, but that is not the most usual outcome. Or the contrary, it tends to respond by redoubling the emphasis on its integrating elements, which is to say on the affirmation of its values and the renewal of its technical constraints and rationality. This is something often seen in educational establishments to the degree in which they are also administrations. A grandiose form of discourse centered on the values and function of the teaching process, associated with invocations of the so-called demands of learning, tries to elbow out all questions about teaching's social functions or the mechanisms of adaptation to social demands. The total institution is very different. Its principal function is to carry out the execution of political decisions. It is therefore disorganized in the sense that it has the minimum of autonomy. It represses more than it integrates, it does not seek to assert its autonomy, but attempts, on the contrary, to shelter behind decisions made outside of itself. Its members are enclosed in a ghetto, settled into a deviant adaptation, as Goffman has stressed. A bureaucratized administration has pretensions to moral integration and technical efficiency. Total institutions are above all given the task of eliminating deviant actors from the social scene so that they will be deprived of their political rights. What is expected of them is to guard the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden, the normal and the pathological so as to keep away the threats that "the barbarians" may hold over the heads of "civilization." Their reason for existence is not inside themselves; their function does not reside in what they do but in what they prevent. They are therefore very little concerned with defining objectives and the interiorization of norms by their members. They will even accept quite readily that their functioning and their results shall be completely contrary to the objectives fixed for them. This is why, if one succeeds in getting through the barriers set up by authority and examines that functioning directly, it is easy in these total institutions to see relations of domination and power in the pure state.
254
Chapter Five
The arbitrary reigns within them absolutely; violence is what governs their social relations, to such an extent that one can no longer speak of a social system. Prisoners and warders, the sick and the disabled with the staff who keep watch over them and "treat" them, none of these belong to an organization. The former are shut away and governed by the others, who act as delegates of the social order. Relations are dominated by force and blackmail, arbitrary decisions and corruption. One cannot speak here of the involution of a system as was the case with bureacratic administrations. No internal dynamic exists, merely a permanent reproduction of exclusion. This description of total institutions only reveals one of the aspects of the process of disorganization, however. In practice, the absorption of the organizational system by the political system can occur just as well in the direction of a direct dominion of the pluralism of the political forces as in the direction of an imposition of the legitimate order. Which leads us to add to the two extreme types already mentioned—total organization and total institution—a third that might be termed the pseudo-political institution. Instead of the organization's being subject to a political system, and without its succeeding in combining within itself an organization system and a political system, it experiences a contamination and a disorganization of both levels of its functioning. Interest groups transform all the elements of the organizational system into objects of transactions, objectives and norms as well as exchanges with the environment or technical management. But at the same time these groups are not defined except by their role and their place within the organization, and are thus incapable of transforming themselves into genuine political forces, in particular because they are not situated at the level of general decisions and because they remain situated inside a heteronomous unity. What we hare is a caricature of self management. These pseudo-political forces do not therefore refer back to class relations and are consequently not actors of a system of historical action. They are organizational pressure groups, seeking to maximize their relative advantages inside the organization, and thus to obtain the greatest possible control over their own conditions of existence and activity, rather than to manage and orient the organization as a whole. Sectional demands are what preponderate, and the definition of objectives and norms is obtained solely in a residual way, as the acceptance of what is compatible with particular interests, within the framework too of the minimum of remaining requirements imposed by institutional decisions. Here again, to speak of bureaucratization creates more confusion than it sheds light. The administration is not imprisoned inside its involution; it is dislocated by the relations of influence between groups that are not defined by their role in an organization. This situation is often to be observed in educational administrations. The teachers defend their professional status
Social Organization
255
and their freedom to devote their time to other activities such as research, writing for publication, or consultation. The students wish to minimize the constraints associated with the obtaining of degrees and think more about a professional future they see as insufficiently linked to the content of their academic activity or to the social and cultural activities they take part in with their friends. The administrative staff negotiates its conditions of work in accordance with norms and by the use of means that are not specific to the organization concerned. It is possible to imagine an ultimate vision of a university in which there is no longer any real interdependence between teachers, students, and nonteaching staff, and which would no longer be definable except as the totality of past transactions between categories coexisting within the same framework defined by the political institutions. An extreme case certainly, but one we come dangerously near when political institutions are not capable o\^ determining objectives and unload their responsibilities upon members of the organization without at the same time giving them the responsibilities that would make self-management a possibility. Disorganization is characterized in particular by the explosion of authority, permanent confusion between authority and influence, and the dissolution of technical equilibria in favor of transactions between interest groups. This administrative disorganization is accompanied by a political disorganization. In such a situation there is no longer either organization or politics but a confused mixture of both levels, which provokes a double reaction. On the one hand, that of the "organizers," who oppose the pseudo-political institution by means of the integration and concern for efficiency of the total organization; on the other, that of the political forces, which seek to disengage themselves from this excessively limited organizational framework in order to act on the level of the political system or on that of class relations. It has been possible to observe these two tendencies at work in French universities in recent years, but his example also shows the tremendous power of resistance of pseudo-political institutions when the problems that give rise to these tendencies are not dealt with at their normal level, which is to say at the level of the political system, of class relations, and of the system of historical action. The organization is crushed by the weight of social relations and cultural choices far too heavy for it. — These analyses demonstrate the usefulness of complementing the study of the organizational system and its crises with that of the relations between the organizational level and the upper levels of social reality within a particular organism. Administrations provide a particularly apt case in this respect. They are by definition the organizations most directly subordinated to the political system. They are on the lowest rung of the social systems ladder. They therefore tend either to isolate themselves from all that governs them, to
256
Chapter Five
bureaucratize themselves, or else to incorporate themselves in the institutional system. This second tendency can take two opposite forms: on the one hand reduction to the role of application of the law and defense of the social order; on the other, confusion with a system of political relations. These various forms of the pathology of administrations: total organization, total institution, and pseudo-political institution, show that the functioning of an administration is governed by its capacity to be at the same time subjected to its objectives and master when it comes to managing its technical constraints: an administration cannot be other than dependent. This dependence presupposes before all else a clear-cut separation between society's functional levels; recognition of the system of historical action, the independence of class relations, and the openness of the political system—these govern an administration's capacity to carry out its tasks, which are at once subordinate, socially and politically, and specific, insofar as they have a technical dimension. In other words, the weaker the state, which is the unifying principle of field of historicity, political system, and social organization, the better an administration functions in its own domain. The dependence of an administration is the condition of its autonomy, as a set of means of management relating objectives defined at a higher level and technical operations imposing their own constraints. This is why the most stable administrations are those furthest from the possibility of transforming themselves into agencies or enterprises, in particular those that manage fiscal resources and expenditure, without any function other than that of a form of management subordinate to political decisions. b.
Enterprises
The objectives of an administration are set at the level of the political system. The same is not true of the enterprise, which is an autonomous decision center directly controlling an organization with economic goals. This definition differentiates between the two levels of the enterprise: it is an organization, a set of means in the service of goals, but it is also a decision center, an economic actor. The enterprise is always more or less controlled by the general political system; its activity must always be carried on within the framework of laws, decrees, and regulations, but one cannot speak of enterprise if the organization's objectives are actually determined by the political institutions. That is the boundary that separates the enterprise from the administration, and it is just as valid for public enterprises as for private ones. State planning, or the setting up of state monopolies within a liberal capitalist society, can result in the creation of vast public services, but these are still enterprises, extremely concentrated but nevertheless autonomous. In contrast, in all those cases in which the state apparatus swallows up the political system we observe a relative lack of differentiation between adminis-
Social Organization
257
tration and enterprise. This case, however, is one of those that demonstrate most clearly the necessity for distinguishing between these two types of organization. Their modes of functioning are so different that the tension between administrative management and the enterprise's capacity for decision is at the heart of planned societies' economic functioning. What does this autonomy of economic decision signify? It can be interpreted as an autonomy in relation to the institutional system. The enterprise then appears as an actor in a market, defining its objectives and its norms, managing its exchanges with the environment and its internal equilibria, in particular the coherence of its technical means. In short, it appears as an organization_in_the jmre state, whereas the administration is not the master of its own objectives, tends to be no more than an appendage of the system of institutionalized decisions, and ultimately to have no autonomy of conduct. This image corresponds to the one that enterprises are apt to offer of themselves. Is their activity not governed by pragmatic goals, by the conquest of markets, by the increase of wealth or by expansion, by the capacity to respond to the modifications of the environment? But it can be objected that if the enterprise is a system of decision and therefore a political unit, it must be recognized that like all political systems it comprises both elements of unity and elements of plurality, that it is at the same time dependent upon a field of historicity and directed toward organizational implementation. Figure 29 shows the nature of the political system again. The enterprise implements the orientations of the system of historical plurality
unity
political slope
societal problems
class domination
institutional slope
political forces (interest groups)
government Figure 29
action and manages their tensions; it is inscribed within class relations and, whatever the nature of those relations, it is the locus where the power of the ruling class is exercised, backed up by juridical formulations. It is also the locus of relations between a number of interest groups; these overlie class relations, in part at least, but replace class conflicts in the decision-making framework, over which the various forces exert a greater or lesser degree of influence. An enterprise as such—which is to say the conjunction of an organization and a decision center—is not where class relations are formed. Those relation? occur at a higher level, the field of historicity. An enterprise is a political unit , -/
258
Chapter Five
whose functioning presupposes class relations and therefore the existence of class power. Certainly its political system can be weakly constituted, only slightly institutionalized; its political participation can be very restricted, limited for example to the internal functioning of a board, or to relations between managers. But it can also extend far more widely, through the development of contractual relations, of participation in consultative organs, or others endowed with certain powers of co-management. Interest groups are not solely the organizational expression of the social classes; we are familiar enough with the lengthy arguments over the relations between linear and functional organization, "staff and line"; enough has been written describing the tensions and negotiations between procedural and production departments, between technical and sales departments, or again between the enterprise, its bankers, and its customers, for it to be pointless to insist here on the multiplicity of the actors intervening in the decision-making process. But, however open the political system of the enterprise may be, it cannot be complete. The "boss" of the enterprise is neither an arbiter nor the representative of a majority, nor the leader of those interest groups posessing most influence. He is the actor responsible for the interests of the ruling class. An enterprise can therefore be redefined as the political system that ensures the transmission of a class domination into the functioning of an organization. This definition will seem unclear, for the reader senses of course that the use of "enterprise" here does not correspond to the everyday use of that term. This everyday use derives from capitalist industrial society. The ruling class in that society establishes its power at the level of the organization of labor and not at that of technical progress. This means that the system of historical action, and in particular the cultural model, remains above the level of economic organizations. The essential elements of that society are the market, capital, the entrepreneur's risk and profit. The nineteenth century created many more images of businessmen than of industrialists. But this situation also implies that the industrial enterprise as an economic unit, as basis for profit, is directly engaged in the sphere of progress and capital. The differentiation between field of historicity and institutional system is weak. In industrial society, establishments with economic ends are agencies and enterprises at the same time. In postindustrial society, the separation of these two types of organization is much more clear-cut, for two reasons. First, a great number of agencies cannot be called enterprises in the usual meaning of the term: this is the case with hospitals, research centers, military or paramilitary establishments. Second, a clear distinction must be made between those economic organiza-
Social Organization
259
tions that are part of the new cultural model in that they contribute to technical progress, function as systems, and answer to a new type of needs, and those—still dominated by the market and the direct dominion of capital over a "productive" labor—that are industrial enterprises in the classical sense and are therefore classified below the level they occupied in industrial society, no longer have any part in the world of the agencies, and have become pure enterprises. The world of economic organizations, even of the very largest, is breaking up more and more clearly into several categories, for we must not forget that side by side with the industrial and the post industrial types there still remains the mercantile type, of which the colonial companies, as well as the oil companies, are the most familiar example. In order to distinguish clearly between the first two of these types, I am imposing on the reader the effort required to replace the social language that speaks of "enterprise" with a sociological language that classes certain economic organizations as agencies and a large number of others as "enterprises/* The importance of these last in the advanced capitalist societies derives from the fact that they occupy an area of changeover from industrial capitalism to a postindustrial society of which they do not represent the technocratic nucleus, and in which they are still striving to maintain capitalist class relations and a capitalist ideology. Agencies are the very seat of class domination, not in the sense of a classical capitalist enterprise with class conflict inside it, but in the new sense that the agency is itself ruling class and imposes its domination on the whole of that sector of society in which it intervenes as accumulation of power. These transformations of economic organizations, which mark the transition from industrial society to postindustrial society, are difficult to analyze. First, because the Western industrialized societies have experienced no break in the transition from one societal type to the other. Capitalism and technocracy are combined within them, and morphological description of the economy does not enable us to separate them from one another. Economic analysis can succeed in this respect and has indeed contributed the principal new ideas in this domain; sociology is playing a part too, specifically in seeking to understand the new social relations and the new fields of negotiation and decision making opening up within economic organizations. Beyond the complexity of certain historical situations, however, it is of course the transformation of economic organizations from one societal type to the other that must be analyzed. In industrial society the domain of organizations, of practical activities, was still dominated by that of the metasocial warrants of social order. The factory was subject to the market just as agricultural life was subject to a simultaneously religious and community-centered cultural model. An organization as such did not extend as high as the field of historicity. There did not exist what in my Sociologie de
260
Chapter Five
Faction I termed "a rationalizing model," the successor to and destroyer of the metasocial warrants. Such a model does not appear until postindustrial society. r 1 In consequence it is in this society, for the first time, that organizations become the locus of social domination. Postindustrial society is dominated by large organizations just as mercantile society was dominated by merchants and princes. Personal, autocratic, or charismatic power is replaced by the impersonal power of the apparatus, of the technostructure. But by the same token, those economic organizations that have no direct participation in the new system of historical action, even though they may possess great wealth and great political influence, are no longer anything but "enterprises" situated below the level of the agencies. If a society allows them a central role, then it is closing the door into postindustrial society in its own face, which is perhaps the case with Europe, in capitalist and socialist countries alike, since it is undoubtedly having great difficulty in emerging from industrial society. In industrial society, on the contrary, and in earlier societies, the ruling class controls the organizational domain directly, to such an extent that it is difficult to talk about organizations at all in, say, medieval society. Economic organizations in industrial society are more dependent upon capitalist power and the market, but this very fact means that they are part of the world of agencies, simply because they are more the instruments of capitalist profit than they are organizations. It is in postindustrial society that the economicjyganizations take up the whole stage, and by the same token become increasingly differentiated, so that among what are usually called enterprises we must make distinctions between administrations, agencies, and enterprises in the sense given to the word here. ~ As a result, if we examine these latter—that is, the organizations that are the locus of decisions and strategies but are not bearers of the cultural model—their internal conflicts of interest, though they may be overlying more fundamental class conflicts, are not direct class conflicts themselves. The agencies alone are the locus of the formation of class conflicts and the stake of them. Industrial enterprises, in industrial society, are the stake of class conflicts because they are agencies at least in part. The growing role of technical progress means that the majority of industrial enterprises today are no longer agencies but what, sociologically, I term enterprises. As for the economic units that play the role of agencies at the same time as that of enterprises, we have to recognize a fundamental tension within them between two opposing modes of action and functioning. The intermediate position occupied by enterprises between administrations and agencies leads to a division into three principal types of enterprise: a central type, a type nearer to administration, and a type nearer to agency.
Social Organization
261
The first gives priority to the objectives-exchanges duo. Its logic of action, to use Lucien Karpik's term (in "Les politiques et les logiques d'action de la grande entreprise industrielle," Sociohgie du travail, January-March 1972, pp. 82-105), is economic. It leaves internal problems in a subordinate position. This type corresponds above all to enterprises placed within a changing environment. The second type is defined by the dominant role of the objectives-norms axis. It presupposes a stable environment, or one whose modifications are controlled. The proximity of this type to the administration is clearly indicated by the fact that it corresponds to many public services. A public transport enterprise closely resembles an administration. Its rules are precise and stable, its authority is of the rational-legal type. Commercial and technical preoccupations are present, but they seem to constitute particular departments within the enterprise rather than elements completely integrated into its management. The third type of enterprise gives central importance to the objectivesequilibria axis. Like an agency, it has moved a long way away from the rational-legal type of authority and closer to management by objectives. The fine control of a technical and human communications system is its principal tas^/These three types of enterprise can be distinguished from one another above all by their degree of internal differentiation. The administrative enterprise is that which functions most completely like an organization. Its institutional system is weaker or more dependent upon the general political
administrative enterprise
exchanges^
development enterprise
commercial enterprise Figure 30
system. It is even more weakly linked to the field of historicity. Class conflict is only manifested in it indirectly, and it bears very little of the burden of the cultural model. The commercial enterprise, on the contrary, is more clearly divided, as we saw at the outset, between an organizational level and an institutional level. One finds a discontinuity appearing within it between grades of personnel with authority and managers. And this creates two acutely sensitive areas within
262
Chapter Five
the enterprise: first, at the foreman level, situated at the point where labor force and management meet and possessing contradictory tendencies that have been emphasized often enough; second, at the level of the management staff, who are forced into forming cliques in order to get beyond staff level and exert any influence on the decisions that they will subsequently be responsible for applying. The development enterprise is already an agency, so that above the level of the organization's managers we find the level of the agents of historicity, which in postindustrial society is that of the more or less technocratic professionals, and in a society of capital industrialization that of the businessmen, the financiers who manage the interests of capital and control the cultural model of "progress." It is desirable to recognize the central position occupied by the commercial enterprise, the most clearly different both from administrations and agencies, a unit of political decisions, locus of conflicts and negotiations, an association of an organization and a center of economic initiative. Enterprises are never, in any type of society, the organizational units of the highest level. That position always belongs to the agencies. c.
Agencies
Certain organizations are agencies of historicity, which is to say that they are directly in the service of the cultural model of the society under consideration. Their members share in this sacred character of the organization, which manifests itself materially in the monumental aspect of its premises. Churches, state palaces, mock Roman temples or medieval castles of finance and industry,! university campuses or research centers, they all seek to dominate their environment and stand out from all other buildings by their size, their materials, their style. The members of the agencies are not defined by an administrativejitatus or by a role in some form of production, even though those two modes of definition occur also, but first and foremost by the fact that they have interiorized certain orientations and transformed them into values for their organization, something they like to express by talking of their vocation or their spirit of "service." More simply, one can speak of their professionalization, meaning that they belong to a "corps'' that controls its recruitment, defines its norms of conduct, and exercises a certain jurisdiction over its members. Values and norms depend upon the nature of the cultural model; they are religiousTVtate-centered, economic, or scientific. The professionals in the agencies are the agents of historicity, the representatives of social creativity, of whatever transcends the functioning of the society while at the same time being embodied in it.
Social Organization
263
In the type of society being formed before our eyes, new categories of professional, new types of agency are appearing. Production enterprises are being transformed into agencies; medicine is being organized into hospitals that are centers for treatment, teaching, and research all at the same time; technical progress, civil as well as military, presupposes the creation of further research centers. And then there are the universities; retaining their dual role as transmitters of a cultural heritage and social inequality on the one hand, and as purveyors of specialists to society according to its needs on the other, they are now becoming more and more the centers for the creation of new knowledge. So that something is being constituted that may only partly correspond to what Fritz Machlup in The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1962) has called the knowledge industries, but which is certainly growing very rapidly. In all types of society the agency that corresponds to the cultural model becomes clericalized; no society has ever known self-management of its cultural model. The result is the formation of a barrier between "cleric" and layman. This is indicated by external signs and is maintained by sanctions against those who cross it, the profaners, in other words, any profane persons who seek to take over these sacred activities. This separation invariably gives rise to the formation of barbarian agencies, to anticlerical activities that can be denoted by the general term of magic: those wrho are not clerics seek to seize the cultural model, to manipulate it, but without respecting its organization and its language. The magician stood opposed to the priest just as the new magicians of astrology, for example, stand in opposition to today's scientists. The Utopian sects played an analogous role in relation to progress, which was the cultural model of the industrial societies. And indeed the cultural model in agrarian and in programmed societies corresponds to "cultural" elements of the economic organization: consumption and production; consequently agencies and magic compete with and oppose one another in cultural areas. When the cultural model draws its strength from "social" elements, on the contrary, that is. from organization and distribution, then the agencies are social forces and the magic will take the form of social groupings striving to wrest the cultural model—state order or progress— from the clerical apparatuses. The pTofessijpnaHzation of the agencies is merely one of their aspects, the one that corresponds most directly to the image they have of themselves. A second aspect concerns their relations with the social classes. If an enterprise is a polkical unit acting within the framework of a class domination, an agency is directly a class actor acting within the framework of the system of historical action. If I have spoken of an agency's values and norms, that is because the agency identifies itself with the cultural model and the system of historical action as a whole. And this identification reveals the class nature of
264
Chapter Five
the agency. For the agency is a part of the ruling apparatus of society. It controls a type of accumulation through its organization. It concentrates in its hands one type of society's resources. Today, the hospital complex is the central element of the public health service; but it also concentrates within itself the whole of the nation's medical resources, a fact that could turn out to be very disadvantageous to the sanitary side of the health service and preventive medicine generally, since as services they are more dispersed and have a less direct relation to the development of knowledge and new biological and medical techniques. Reliable observers of the organization of health care in the United States have consequently been able to point to the fact that although large American hospitals are probably the best in the world, the health of the United States' population as a whole does not rate nearly as high in a worldwide comparison. It was with such things in mind that doctors and medical students in France, in 1968, felt compelled to protest against a narrowly professional medical training that seemed to them quite indifferent to the psychological and social problems that are to a very large degree what in practical terms determine the need for treatment. Finally, is it necessary to recall the central importance given by the student movement, whether in the United States or in France, to protests against the university's technocratic role, against its indifference to the students' education in the wider sense and to social problems, against its links with other elements of the power elite, civil and military?^ would be erroneous to believe that class conflicts set rulers and ruled against each other within agencies. Agencies are what Galbraith has called technostructures, and though it is true that the conflicts that form within them are in consonance with class conflicts, the latter set the agency as center of power and accumulation more directly in opposition to the consumers of the services the agencies control and dominate. The conflict, as I have said many times, is always simultaneously economic and sociocultural, linked to the forms of control over accumulation and over the cultural model. The third principal aspect of the agencies is that their objectives are not subordinated to any higher instance, so that in consequence their organizational system is more strongly integrated than that of the enterprises or of the administrations. This integration is so great, the relating of objectives to techniques so complete, that an agency can be described both as an organization and as a voluntary association. This extreme integration goes hand in hand with an extreme internal differentiation between the organizational system, the institutional system, and the implementation of the system of historical action. The integration signifies that both norms and exchanges are no more than mediations between objectives and techniques, between creativity and equilibrium. This situation is the reverse of that in an administration, where the
Social Organization
265
norms tend to assume the main role. The technical role thus becomes participation in the objectives, as the very theme of professionalization suggests. Managing an agency means simply managing its functioning and no longer involves the pursuit of aims external to the organization. Differentiation does not necessarily take the form of hierarchized subsystems. But in every agency there exists a higher decision level that is "professional"—which is to say regulated in accordance with its higher principles—then a political level, and last an organizational level proper. This makes it possible to situate an agency in relation to two extreme and opposite types: that in which each level becomes independent of the others and that in which they become indistinguishable. In the first case the organization breaks up into an agency, an enterprise, and an administration. In the second, the fusing of the levels brings about a general ritualization, a mixing of technical operations and service of the cultural model. The idea can be put forward that the differentiation, which is to say the autonomy of the hierarchized subsystems, depends above all on the ruling class role played by the agency. It is to the degree in which the functioning of the agency is not of an absolutist type, in which the dominated social forces succeed in questioning the agency's domination, that the separation and hierarchization of functional levels is realized in the most satisfactory manner. This action does in fact tend to separate the political level from the professional level on the one hand and from the technical functioning on the other; nevertheless, absence of contestation, by reinforcing the direct link between objectives and techniques, tends to eliminate the importance of the institutional level. These three aspects are combined in all agencies, which, more than enterprises and administrations, are complete organizations; they are professionalized; they are a society's ruling apparatus. But their relative importance can vary greatly from one case to another. This leads us to distinguish three elementary types of agency: the professional, the managerial, and the technical Agencies of the first type are the nearest to the general picture of agencies just given. They develop when the agency hasn't the right to influence its environment directly and, consequently, when it is placed under public control, the complete form of which is the self-management of a set of resources. The managerial agencies are, on the contrary, those that have the capacity to mold social demand to fit in with their interests, and are consequently those that have the greatest economic independence. The technical agencies are those subjected to the strongest technical constraints and having the most indirect relation with the cultural model. The relative importance of these three types depends above all on the role
266
Chapter Five
of the state in society, since the state is the organ that links the various levels of society's functioning: field of historicity, political system, and organization. The stronger these links are, the more the state intervenes in the field of historicity and the more it tends to subordinate itself to or incorporate itself into the agencies, thus transforming the professional agencies into managerial agencies or reducing them to the state of technical agencies,/This proposition is a counterpart of the one put forward a little earlier according to which the combination of an open class conflict with a direct reference to the stake of that conflict, which is to say the system of historical action, is the most favorable situation for the formation of agencies at the highest, that is the professional, level. An all-powerful state will have nothing surrounding it but administrations; if it is merely interventionist, then it will allow private political systems and enterprises; if it is reduced to an apparatus for the execution of political decisions, then its place in the field of historicity is occupied by agencies—on condition, at least, that that place is not entirely occupied by the domination of the ruling class, which refuses to allow the activity of any agency not directly subject to its interests. The universities know from experience how narrow the path is that permits them to protect themselves at the same time from state domination and from that of the ruling class. 1 don't think they are sufficiently aware that this independence presupposes that they themselves are struggling against their ruling role, whether they are actually the agent of their contestation, or whether they are the allies of popular forces. Administrations, enterprises, and agencies are all organizations. But in the case of administration the higher levels of society's functioning are not projected onto the organizational system, whereas at the opposite extreme the agency belongs directly to the system of historical action, to class relations, to society's political and organizational levels. Enterprises, lastly, are subordinate to the field of historicity and in particular to class relations, but still possess a political system as well as an organizational system. What emerges from the preceding observations is that the integration of the organizational system is ensured best, not in the administrations, which is to say when the organizational system is most isolated from the higher systems, but in the agencies. Differentiation and integration go hand in hand. The administration is subjected to contradictory forces, one set pushing it toward the loss of its autonomy, the other set toward bureaucratization. It maintains its integration only with difficulty and often tends to become reduced to a single one of its elements, its norms. There is, on the other hand, a close association between principles and practices in the agencies, in which action directed outward and action directed inward tend to fuse, just as orientations do with techniques or dependence does with autonomy.
Social Orcanization
267
But this superior integration of the agency is also more constantly threatened by its role in class relations. Every agency is a center of power and therefore a constituent part of the ruling class. The stronger its class role is, and therefore—in our society, at least—the more technocratic it is, the more its professional role, its political system, and its organizational system are threatened with disaggregation. Inversely, the more an administration is the agent of class domination, the more easily it achieves integration, without losing an independence that it cannot in any case possess. This comes to the same thing as saying that the stronger class domination is, the more likelihood there is of organizations taking the form of administrations and the less chance they have of being agencies. This explains the ambiguity of the social situation of the professionals in the agencies: they are at the same time linked with the ruling class as managers of the apparatuses and in opposition to it in order to maintain their direct relation with the orientations of the system of historical action. An administration, in the main, is turned in upon itself, concerned with accomplishing the tasks assigned to it. It applies norms and the sanctions that maintain those norms. An agency, on the other hand, has all the characteristics of the system of historical action. It is a network of tensions. It is never solidly based within society's functioning; it wavers between heaven and hell. To speak of it as one speaks of an administration or an enterprise, whose objectives are defined in a much more specific, not to say institutional, manner, is always inadequate. An agency does not fulfill a function, it produces society. Does the distinction made between administrations, enterprises, and agencies cover organizations in their entirety? Don't all the chosen examples correspond either to production organizations or management organizations? Is it possible to deal in an analogous way with organisms of socialization, say the school, or, in certain societies, churches, not to mention the family, which cannot be defined as an organization? One is at first tempted to answer in the negative, and to view the school or the church as a locus for the transmission of a culture or an ideology, not as an organization in which both the orientations of the system of historical action and class conflicts are manifested. However, the reasons for replying in the positive have already been given and had better be repeated. Class relations are indeed present in the school, both because the school is a preserver of social inequality and because it modifies it, either by increasing it or by reducing it. On the other hand, the school—including the secondary school—partakes of all the levels of social analysis: as organization it carries out technical functions while at the same time inculcating norms of authority, in other words reproducing power; as an agent of adaptation to professional and social change it belongs to the institutional system; and, last, as a locus for
268
Chapter Five
the production and diffusion of a mode of knowledge and a cultural model, it belongs to historicity. In other words it is at the same time an administration, an enterprise, and an agency. If one goes back to preindustrial societies, then the church, which was responsible in those days for schooling, can be described in the same way. One must avoid opposing "practical" organizations to others that are supposedly '4ideological.'' They are all built around techniques and around a power; they are all the locus of domination and conflict at one and the same time. d.
Secularization
Creativity is increasingly apprehended as practice, as a whole set of operations transforming culture, man's relations with his environment. The cultural model changes, but without ceasing to define a transcendence of the social order: postindustrial society is oriented toward scientific progress as firmly as the old agrarian societies were toward divine power. This evolution is accompanied by a downgrading of what was an agency in a certain society into an enterprise, then into an administration, until it finally disappears completely as an organization. So that although there may never be any secularization of society, we can observe a secularization of certain organizations. This downgrading has now reached its final stage in the case of religious organizations. The agency was first of all transformed into an enterprise, which is to say into a political force, then into an administration, before finally exploding, as we see happening today in the case of the Christian churches of the West. This downgrading appears less brutal in practice because there are always fragments of earlier societies subsisting within the postindustrial societies in a state of formation. However, it is more important to note that the downgrading, interrupted by attempts to regain an earlier importance, is accompanied by an increase of anti-organizational conduct, by a transformation of the organization into a voluntary association that strives to revive the spirit or essence of the downgraded agency, as is shown by the proliferation of sects, basic communities, or social movements deeply imbued with religious inspiration that have grown up on the ruins of the religious agencies. These processes are less advanced in the case of state organizations. The downgrading of these agencies must not be confused with the withering away of the state in a general sense, an expected development contradicted by observation of the industrialized societies. The majesty of the state agencies is replaced in industrial society by the growing importance of state services as enterprises, as political agents. This is why capitalist industrialization has experienced such a strong tendency to confuse the state with the political system. In postindustrial society, state organizations are increasingly administrations, and this creates a very large
Social Organization
269
gap between a state power, intervening in economic and social life, financing and controlling new agencies, managing the progress of knowledge, and the state administrations executing the decisions of a political system in which enterprises play a considerable role. France is finding the downgrading of its state agencies into administrations difficult to cope with. These new administrations persist in trying to preserve the image of their former function, that of serving the general interest; they persist in demanding the respect of those subject to them; and they refuse to recognize that they function within the framework of a class domination and in accordance with the relations of influence operating in the political system. In the domain of the state too, the downgrading of the agencies is accompanied both by attempts at restoration and, more important, by counterorganizational endeavors demanding community self-management. The evolution of economic organizations is shorter: from being agencies in industrial society they are downgraded in postindustrial society to being enterprises, decision centers, at least insofar as they do not manage to transform themselves back into agencies by linking their growth to technical progress. Lastly, the knowledge organizations are today experiencing, ever increasingly, the splendor of the agencies. The isolation of the researcher is replaced by the creation of laboratories, hospitals, research centers, university institutes. These transformations are summed up in figure 31. The table gives concrete expression to the frequent definition of postindustrial society as a society of organizations. It is in fact in this type of society that the domain of organizations reaches its broadest extent, at least within society's practical activity. organizations religious
state
economic
knowledge
agency
*
*
*
mercantile society
enterprise
agency
*
•
industrial society
administration
enterprise
agency
•
*
administration
enterprise
agency
agrarian society
postindustrial society
Figure 31
The ruling class has to be increasingly defined in industrialized societies by the organizations it controls, as the management elite, as the technocracy. It
|
270
Chapter Five
is less and less in the service of metasocial warrants of the social order. This is a transformation that is far from complete, above all in countries where industrialization has encountered, and is encountering, the resistance of previous social forms. There the rulers still like to situate themselves above the organizations as custodians of an absolute power, able to serve as an ultimate recourse for subjects who have fallen victim to abuses of authority committed by lower ranks and sometimes feeling themselves bound by the duties of noblesse oblige. Crozier (in La society bloquee, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970) has given a very good description of this resistance on the part of the former French ruling class to their organizational role. C.
The Categories of Social Practice
a.
Organizations between Historicity and History
Organizations implement a system of historical action and class relations within the framework of a political system, but these levels of society's functioning also overflow any particular organization. Organizational conduct and relations are determined by the categories of social practice, the concrete expression of the field of historicity and the political system. The organization is a decision center, it acts in terms of objectives and establishes norms, it defines roles. But it is not sufficiently its own master to choose them freely; its functioning is not determined by its intentions. It would be a serious illusion to believe that an organization, whether factory or school, hospital or army, controls, is able by its decisions to transform, its own social function, its forms of authority, its human relations, its forms of socialization. A concrete unit of action, it is at the same time capable of enacting and changing its rules of existence yet immersed in a society that determines it at the higher levels of the field of historicity and the political system. The necessary counterpart to a study of organizations is therefore that of the categories of social practice* which are not created by individual organizations but depend most immediately on institutional decisions and, beyond that, on class relations and the orientations of the system of historical action. Hence the fact that organizations fulfilling very different functions yet belonging to the same society have a gTeat many features in common, what one might call a common spirit, which is evident equally in their relations of authority, their definition of roles, and their forms of stratification and communication. Does this statement perhaps take us back to a question referred to at the beginning of this chapter? Does there exist a unity of the categories of social practice to be sought for either in a central body of values or in the dominion of an agent of social domination?
Social Organization
271
These apparently antithetical forms of the same statement are equally unacceptable. They correspond to two theoretical extremes only. It is possible to imagine a society organized around values and a consensus and such that conflicts and tensions develop within those values, within the norms that specify them, the means of social control that maintain them, and the agencies of socialization that transmit them. But no differentiated society actually corresponds to this image of the Gemeinschaft. Historians are constantly reminding us that values, even when manifested in the ceremonial form of a written constitution, always correspond to particular social groups and that it is arbitrary to say that the Declaration of the Rights of Man was a formulation of the values held by peasants in Picardy or artisans in the Faubourg St-Antoine. It is more tempting to say that the categories of social practice taken as a whole possess a unity that is in fact the unity of the ideology of the dominant class. For one would not speak of dominant class if it was in fact not capable of imposing rules and forms of social and cultural organization on a collectivity as a whole. However, there is no reason to believe that the domination in question is in practice complete. It is so only when the dominant class completely reduces historicity to the dimensions of its own interests, replaces the elements of the system of historical action with the counterelements that make up its ideology, its values; when its hegemony over the political system is a total dominion; when it reduces the functioning of the social organization to the reproduction of its own power. In a word, when the society loses all historicity, is reduced to slavery. This in fact corresponds to the extreme forms of the colonial situation, when the imposition of an assimilative ideology and a repressive order is stronger than the effort to promote dependent economic development. The further one moves away from such a situation, which cannot be described solely in terms of class but rather in terms of total domination, the less the image of social practice as integrated ideological discourse is acceptable. On the one hand the agencies of historicity retain a certain autonomy; second, the domination is repressive and not solely integrating; it rejects, it does not completely assimilate. In the third place, there therefore exists, in various forms, a defensive reaction or counteroffensive on the part of the dominated classes. Last, there exists a certain autonomy of technology and of the forms of social activity that cannot be reduced to ideologies. No social practice can ever be understood by eliminating class domination, or by reducing that practice to an ideology of the dominant class. Class conflict and reference to the system of historical action always remain the two fundamental and inseparable principles of sociological analysis.
272
Chapter Five
Before continuing with this analysis we must consider a second way in which social practice can overflow organizations. Since organizations are individual, concrete agents, they are not situated merely in a field of historicity and a political system. They also act within a historical situation constituted by the superimposition and combination of different sociological subgroups. The labor relations within an organization are not determined simply by the form of the organizational system: they do not even depend solely on class relations and political interactions; they are also stamped by past forms not only of working-class conduct but of employer conduct. And this becomes even truer, the more heterogeneous, the more "dualist," the more dependent the society in question is, and also the more it is committed to a voluntarist effort to construct a new society with "old" men. The state of an organization at any given moment is a historical fact, a decision is an event, not just a case for applying a system's operational principles. Social organization depends upon a field of historicity yet at the same time escapes from it; or, rather, what is in everyday parlance called a society— denoting a collectivity situated in time and space—overflows social organization, since the latter is grouping together fragments from several societal wholes into the unity of a political whole, which is transmitting the dominion of a system of historical action and a ruling class. Here the sociologist plays second fiddle to the historian, but he can still be of use to him. Social life is made up not only of forms of social organization lagging behind or in advance of the main form, but also, attached to those fragments, of tattered remains from secondary political systems, from class relations now withering away or else just taking shape, from elements of systems of historical action now falling apart or in the process of formation. We live not only in a system of sociocultural orientations and classes but also in the midst of ghosts, of shades to which life still clings, dreams still or already real, and by means of which we communicate with the past and the future, rather than belonging solely to the present. Our words are addressed not only to those before us now, they are uttered also on a stage on which the past is being replayed, and the future is being rehearsed. Everything that exists at the same time is not synchronic, does not belong to the same system, is not coherent. Is this experience not more vivid today than in the past? The rapidity of structural changes means that we live more today in the very midst of our dead, still here with us, as indeed in the midst of our descendants, who infiltrate us by means of the changes that drive us out of our present. The more we live in a society of simultaneity and ubiquity, the more we are others at the same times as ourselves, and the more we wrap ourselves around in the dream and in the art that give form and movement to the shadow of other forms of historicity. Real experience is always out of synchronization
Social Organization
273
with social systems. A society reduced simply to the concatenation of a field of historicity, institutions, and social organization would be so oppressive that the individual would be unable to bear it; for he would then be nothing but what he did, and would no longer be capable of imagination and change. He would no longer have to decipher the worn inscriptions of the past and the signs heralding his future, could no longer be a personal agent of change. Those we call great men are surely those who succeed, by dint of their deep attachment to the past and future, in escaping from the illusions of the established order and discovering, behind the false unity of social organization, the central structures of society, into which they make their way in order to become agents of historicity. It must also be said that no organization, no concrete society, is ever reducible to a collection of fragments of historicity. Always, mingled in with all the facts that belong to the realm of socio logy, one finds those that pertain to anthropology. No social organization ever wholly escapes from the exigencies of its survival; in all of them it is possible to discern the profound imprint of cultural constructions expressing questions foreign to historicity and bearing upon life and death, upon sex, upon the relation to the other, and so on. Every organization employs techniques and languages that are made use of by social action but are not the product of social interactions. Human societies are also part of nature. The specific characteristics of the human system are superimposed upon those of various kinds of nonhuman systems that are therefore also present in the social life of men. It is certainly true that the more the historicity of societies grows, the greater their capability of acting upon themselves, the more too does the area of cultural and social "structures" seem to shrink, in the same way as kinship systems break down in urbanized societies. But there is no proof that historical actioj^entirely fills the void thus created. For what disappears in the way of established order constantly reappears as play, as voluntary activities, and more broadly still as new forms of community in social life. Those societies with the most abundant and complex economic resources at their disposal cannot be reduced to their labor any more than the others can, just as the progress of science does not eliminate our questioning of the human condition. Every social organization is a moving frontier between human nature and social action, between the realm of anthropology and that of sociology. At every moment we run up against the limits of our territory, and we have no assurance that they are still expanding. b.
The Practice of Historicity
Returning to the determination of the categories of social practice within the framework of a field of historicitv one encounters first of all the orientations
274
Chapter Five
of the system of historical action. They manifest themselves most directly in agencies, and with most difficulty in those enterprises and administrations that remain stamped with the role of agency that they may have played in previous societies while being at the same time less closely linked to the new system of historical action. They are not imprisoned in the agencies however, and spread through the whole of society in the form of expectations, demands. In the most industrialized societies, value is assigned to participation in scientific and technical progress, to professional proficiency, to organization by objectives, to enjoyment, without our being able for all that to speak of a body of values, since these different orientations are in tension one with another and, moreover, can never be separated from the positions occupied by the actors in class relations. But these orientations do constitute a whole that can be presented in cultural expressions. A society recognizes itself in works of art that are not declarations of principle or ideological works but the transcription of that societal thematic in terms of an individual experience of it. The work of art moves through all the levels of social reality, from system of historical action to individual life story via class relations, the state of the institutions, and the role of the state. But its degree of universalism depends upon its capacity to raise itself to the level of historicity, of a mode of knowledge, a cultural model, and a type of accumulation. On the other hand, its importance decreases proportionately as it is more ''idealistic" or, on the contrary, more "realistic,*' which is to say, as it tries on the one hand to express the spirit of a civilization more and on the other to describe the functioning of society and its various activities more directly. The most poverty-stricken art of all is that type which identifies realism with idealism, as in the case of "socialist realism." If I have brought art into this discussion, it is because the practice of historicity cannot be isolated in one step. It can only be reached and expressed by starting out from what is furthest removed from it—personal experience, the lived event. If one tries to grasp it "objectively," one can only end up confusing it with the forms of social organization, political relations, and class relations. This also explains how it is that the practice of historicity can be best discerned, outside art, in social movements, which themselves have profound exchanges with art. It is through organizational demands, institutional pressure, and contestation of class power that the path up towrard the system of historical action lies. It is in this sense that a Utopia is not on the fringe of society but at its center, although only on condition that it does not take the system of historical action apart in order to pick out and retain only one element, in other words only on condition that it overflows class conflict. The practice of historicity is therefore never the mere functioning of
Social Organization
275
organizational forms. It constantly transcends them and appears as a force of protest rather than of conformity. But although it is true that the reascent toward the system of historical action is effected from a starting point in social practice by the agency of art and social movements, the common experience of the actors cannot be reduced to these creative forms of conduct. The orientations of the system of historical action affect each one of us via class domination, political decisions, organizational authority, and state power, which is to say via historical aggregates that would only be transparent to social systems if they were sociologically homogeneous, something that is never the case. The actor is separated from the system of historical action by the whole interwoven opacity of the forms of domination, of hegemony, and of power, and by the whole weight of social reproduction and the transmission of statuses. He therefore constantly tends to hive himself off from this social and historical framework, to confront the laws, the rule, the traditions with an appeal to creativity centered upon himself as an individual or upon willed social interactions. He confronts the crushing pyramid of instituted social forms with the force of his spontaneity, the instituting, absolute force of desire. But this reaction is necessarily ambiguous. As transcendence of the dominated, institutionalized, organized, inherited order it is the most concrete means of return to the production of society, to its historicity. But such a return can only be void of content, pure distancing rather than counteraffirmation. Social action, individual or collective, that took this rebellion as its principle of orientation would be led in the first place to a total dehistoricization, to a recourse to the fundamental needs of man that can never be anything, behind an idealist form, but the shadow of the order being fought and usually the mythical image of a golden age in some undefined past or future. It would then become even more the prisoner of what it is fighting than before, since it would become indistinguishable from marginality, especially from the crisis reactions of the various social systems, and hence from the conduct of anomie. The appeal to spontaneity, to personal creativity, always runs the risk of combining very easily with a reinforcement of the social order, just as the ghetto reinforces the dominant interests that are excluding it. For the sociologist no human needs exist that can be opposed to the social order as a nature can be opposed to cultural constraints. Fundamental needs, imperative demands, exist in every society, but they are nothing other than the orientations of the system of historical action and therefore cannot be lived outside social relations of domination, of decision, and of organization. And this fact brings the other slope of the actor's relations with the system of
276
Chapter Five
historical action into view. As against revolt there is also participation. The forms of social interaction then appear as agents for the realization~of the system of historical action. Participation in that system is not separable from participation in the social order, and the dominant forces at all levels of society actively exploit this confusion of cultural orientations with the social order. This in fact defines the creation of values and norms, the concrete expression of the dominant class's ideology acting through its institutional hegemony and its organizational power. Social participation does not succeed in bringing the actor into relation with the system of historical action, for it binds him both to the interests of domination and power and also to a historically formed and bequeathed order. So that the man who makes his way up toward God by way of his church becomes the prisoner of that church, of its dominant role and its traditions. The actor cannot reach the system of historical action directly within the social organization; he can do no more than manage, with greater or lesser success, the dialectic of engagement and disengagement. He can only escape from this by moving up from the social organization level to the upper levels, first by becoming a political actor and, even better, by transforming himself into a producer of society, through social movements and through art. And, even then, social movements are directed at the transformation of social organization and tend to impose a new identification of the system of historical action with another social order, while art for its part is unable to separate personal creation from means of expression that are also, in their turn, part of the social order and therefore determined by the relations of domination and power. Every society tends to construct a societal Utopia, a paradise in which a direct relation is established, beyond all social interaction, between the individual and cultural orientations that have in course become values. But the realization of such a societal Utopia could only be the construction of a totalitarian society, the reduction of society to the state, the identification of all with the commandments of a charismatic power. The relation of actor to historicity cannot exist outside the dialectic of revolt and participation. c.
Class Relations and Social Practice
It would be futile to talk about class domination if it did not have a visible effect on social practice. In fact the political system too operates within the limits that domination permits. It manifests itself through inequality. But this notion, like that of stratification, to which it is very close, tends to look much simpler than it really is and can introduce confusion. Beginning from the same descriptions, it can equally well lead to a functionalist analysis as to the revealing of class relations. It speaks of social organization in terms of
Social Organization
277
historical actors, and vice versa. It is not difficult to see that men do not come into the world and live in it as equals in fact, that social mobility is limited, that the opportunity of access to education, to income, to the highest qualifications are dependent on social origin. One can also add with equal facility that inequalities at the outset are both institutionalized and interiorized, so that the man setting out from a low level has a lower level of aspirations and expectations, while at the same time he has already been directed into channels that diminish his chances of ascent. But the study of social stratification has no need to make use of the concept of class. The more one defines society as an integrated whole, possessing both values or a common ideology and mechanisms for the creation and reproduction of inequality, the nearer one stays to a functionalist analysis, which can have either a left- or right-wing tone without its basic approach being affected in any way. It is only necessary to introduce the concept of class if the analysis has to explain breaks in the social organization and even, to be much more precise, rejections. This is something that goes much further than the idea of selection, since no collectivity exists that does not have more or less well developed mechanisms for selection and for the reproduction of inequalities. But inversely, if the society is completely cut in two. it is impossible to see how the upper class can maintain its domination other than by force alone, since it is by definition numerically smaller. The use of force, of constraint, of repression is constant; but here one can follow the Gramsci of the Quaderni del Carcere and, in particular, of // materialismo storico e la filosofia de Benedetto Croce(Turin: Einaudi, 1966) in saying that class domination must necessarily resort both to coercion—which is the role of political society, that is, the state apparatus—and to integration, which is the definition of the role of what Gramsci calls civil society, using that phrase in a rather different sense than is usual. This integrating role cannot be reduced to action in the form of propaganda. Its importance stems from the fact that the upper class identifies itself with the system of historical action and with historicity itself. And this, I repeat, has two meanings: on the one hand it produces the Utopia presenting the upper class as the servants of historicity; on the other, it identifies historicity with the upper class's own interests, in an ideological manner, thus laying a foundation for its domination and rejecting those who do not conform to it. The dominion of the ruling class over social practice cannot therefore be reduced either to a work of unification, to the spinning of a web of social and cultural categories within which the collectivity as a whole functions, or to an action of separation and rejection. These two aspects are equally important and inseparable. If one looks at the school system in France and, more generally, at the transmission of knowledge, one can say with Pierre Bourdieu
27B
Chapter Five
and Jean Claude Passeron (Les heritiers, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1964, and La reproduction, Editions de Minuit, 1970) that its function is to reproduce inequality, to keep everyone in the place assigned to him in the social hierarchy. But Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet (Uecole capitaliste en France, Paris: Maspero, 1971) are right in setting against this ideological integration the efficiency of the mechanisms of separation and repression. However, their observations too are only partial, for the school system must also permit and organize a certain mobility, diffuse the values of the ruling class, manage social practice as a whole. To sum up, the upper class does not exert a unified action but rather multiple actions that form a system of dominion over social practice. As ruling class it acts differently from the way it acts as dominant class; second, it exerts both an opening and a closing action. Closing because it is a specific group that manages and controls accumulation, that is, defending its own interests and maintaining its privileges; opening because it wishes to rule and dominate society as a whole. The elements of this system of dominion are defined in figure 32. The whole formed by these four elements belongs to the ideology of the upper class. The term ideology has the advantage of indicating the continuity between the level of class relations and that of social organization. But in order to avoid confusion, and also to stress that it is not a discourse that is involved here but a practical activity—the constitution of the categories of social practice—it seems to me that the term dominion is clearer.
ruling class dominant class
openness
closedness
mobility
concentration
integration
repression
Figure 32
The forms of the division of labor or the occupation of space, the distribution of authority, recruitment and promotion channels, the form and content of sanctions, the symbols of social status are not just ideas or conceptions but the very shape of daily life translated into regulations, into decisions, and even into institutional mechanisms, for the dominion of the dominant class is not the product of a system of influences and negotiations. It can be modified by decisions of the political system, but it is more deeply rooted than that system, for it is class domination in action. Power is the manifestation of domination in an organization; dominion is the form it takes in the whole field of social practice. Concentration means that in every social organization the dominion of the ruling class makes itself visible by an opposition between center and
Social Organization
279
periphery, rulers and ruled, or some such analogous dichotomy. Hierarchy is discontinuous, and that discontinuity must be amalgamated with the apparent continuity of a stratification. This is a classic theme of sociological investigations, which usually collect opinions that amalgamate the two types of representation, in other words that recognize, beyond the hierarchy of functions and continuity of an organization chart, a line of rupture and qualitative change. Mobility here does not only signify the ideology according to which life is a race or a process of natural selection in which the best is supposed to win. Social organization does in fact provide channels of social ascent, and a ruling class—in the United States or the Soviet Union more so than in Europe —likes to draw attention to the cases of those of its members who rose from rags to riches. This mobility does not only have the function of renewing and therefore strengthening the ruling class; it also manifests the identification of the ruling class with the system of historical action: those who rise are the most "modern," the most enterprising, and by that very fact form the ruling class. Integration is linked with the action of the dominant class. It therefore cannot be reduced to the incorporation of the greatest possible number into a social practice defined by the ruling class. It entails the formation of a dominant bloc in which new and old ruling classes and their allies, whether social categories or state forces, are all at least partially fused. What is involved therefore is an integration into a mode of domination involving the past as much as the present and future. It is more directly ideological than mobility or concentration but less instrumental. Hence its importance in the school system, which is integrating children and teenagers less into the practice of the ruling class than into a complex whole, in which the reproduction of former forms of social domination plays an essential role. So-called arts subjects, particularly history, literature, and philosophy, are deeply imprinted with this ideological function of integration, laying great stress on the continuity of the great works. An extreme form of this integration is to be found in Harvard's Redbook of 1945, which lays down that university's principal task as being the handing on of the Western cultural heritage, formed in Greece, then in Rome, developed by Christian civilization and extended by modern humanism and liberalism. The defenders of classical education in France have often had recourse to analogous terms in their eulogies of humanism, of disinterested culture, the product of a succession of social and intellectual elites. But this integration is never complete. Its counterpart, and by the same token the complement to the work of concentration, is repression. The social organization must eliminate, exclude, encyst, and reduce to silence all those who are not integratable and who have been constituted as deviants by the
280
Chapter Five
mechanisms of concentration and integration. Repression's aim is not solely the defense of order against disorder but also the defense of values against the forces that reject them. Taylor offers workers the opportunity to share in the behavior of the capitalist entrepreneur. They can enrich themselves by their labor if they put their reason and self-interest to the correct use. But if the carrot and the interiorization of capitalist values won't do the trick, then the whip has to be used. More crudely still, the colonizer deplores the idleness of the natives who stop working as soon as they have managed to earn the handful of dates that will enable them to subsist. They must therefore be constrained to provide their labor and excluded from a participation that they themselves refuse and of which they are incapable. The relative importance of each of the elements of this system of dominion of the upper class over social practice depends upon the nature of the class domination. The more heterogeneous a society is, the more closely old and new dominant classes are associated, the more integration and repression preponderate. The more the ruling class possesses a political hegemony, the more concentration and repression acquire importance. These two situations are found most strongly combined in the colonial situation. But even in the case of a fairly strongly homogenized and liberal industrialized society, that is, one in which the political system is largely autonomous with relation to class domination, the dominion of the ruling class is not reduced to the ideology of mobility, even though that element does have a greater visibility here than in other cases. For the nearer a society approaches the postindustrial type, the more profoundly it intervenes in itself and also the higher the degree of integration it demands from its members, while at the same time imposing an intense concentration, with the result, in a society already possessing greater mobility than others, of increasing the field of repression and at the same time transforming it. The reproduction of a class domination cannot therefore be reduced to the concealment of that domination behind a set of categories and mechanisms deriving their authority only from rationality, good sense, principles, or traditions, and never from class interests. Such an explanation in fact comes to the same thing as talking in needlessly dramatic terms about the permanence of a social system organized around values, norms, and instruments for controlling the social order and the socialization of new members of a society. From the moment one introduces class conflict, one can no longer explain the maintenance of domination by the masks behind which it conceals itself, for the class adversary can tear off the masks at any given moment. Therefore repression must be exerted, a barrier must be raised between the acceptable and the forbidden, deviance must be named and penalized, darkness must surround the central light.
Social Organization
281
It is not only class domination that imposes rejections and repressions. Society's historicity itself defines the field of the possible, renders certain forms of conduct, certain feelings, or certain ideas inconceivable, incongruent. No culture can respect all the past and leave the way completely free into the future; it would lose its identity in the uninterrupted flow of change. This is why the reproduction of the system of historical action and of class relations cannot be confused with the social control that is situated at the institutional level, and even less with the rules that govern the functioning of a community, of a concrete whole defined in its human and nonhuman environment and submitting itself to laws indispensable for its survival, for its integration, for its defense against external threats, for the maintenance of its internal and external equilibria. Societies with a strong historicity almost cease to experience such laws, for they are dominated by decisions and plans for change and no longer by homeostatic mechanisms; consequently, while less imperative in their norms, while more diversified and tolerant, they are also more repressive, for the changing of historicity and hence of class movements and conflicts is constantly on the increase. Faced with this dominion of the upper class over the categories of social practice, the popular class is to a great extent deprived of means of action and subjected to alienation, to that contradiction that so many films, books, and sociological researchers have so often described, especially in the case of the workers, between dependent participation in a practice defined and managed by the upper class and reference to a counterorganization constituted by the popular class. This counterdominion is by its nature less visible, but its importance is considerable. The sociology of the informal organization has thrown a great deal of light on it, especially since the famous "Hawthorne studies" carried out at the Western Electric plant in the late 1920s (see F. J. Roethlisberger and W. J. Dickson in Management and the Worker, Harvard University Press, 1939). This counterdominion acts in accordance with the logic of popular action in the double dialectic of the social classes. To the openness managed by the ruling class it responds with a defensive closing. To the closedness established by its adversary it opposes a contestatory opening-up. One could therefore define this system of counterdominion as done in figure 33. Equalityis the response to concentration. It is aimed at the removal not of hierarchies but of barriers and the dichotomization of society. In a more elementary way it is a matter of eliminating within the group those forms of hierarchy that are based on participation in the dominant sphere. Resistance stands against mobility. This is the traditional theme of the go-slow and the establishing of group norms in opposition to the attraction exerted and organized by the ruling class.
282
defensive class contestatory class
Chapter Five
ciosedness
openness
resistance
equality
counters ociety
liberty
Figure 33
The theme of the countersociety is more directly ideological than the previous ones, just as integration is more so than mobility or concentration. The best analyses in this field have been produced by those who have studied resistance to colonial domination. The rejection of integration or of its extreme form, assimilation, draws its strength from the mobilization of a threatened culture, a culture defended not because it is traditional but because it acts as a breakwater to aid resistance against the inflow of domination and corruption. In the same way, at the moment of the labor movement's greatest development there appeared the theme of proletarian culture, and even today, as at other moments in history, there is still the attempt to organize a counterculture. Last, the theme of liberty fights back against repression, not by organizing ghettos, which merely reinforces the work of integration and repression, but by challenging the boundary that social order establishes between the permitted and the forbidden, the normal and the pathological, the integrated and the deviant. The antipsychiatry movement and the struggle against the various forms of imprisonment in prisons, asylums, or homes, is the most contemporary expression of this attempt at counterdominion. However, it is difficult to see how counterdominion could be the exclusive work of the popular class itself, simply because of the weight on it of both constraints and alienation. The role of the count erelites, drawn mostly from the intelligentsia, is therefore almost always important in this attempt to challenge the values and norms established by the ruling class, and also in generating a practice to combat them. But their intervention is only sufficient if the conflict remains on the ideological level proper. It is important on the social organization level only if it draws its strength solely from a popular practice of counterdominion, only if it is revealing that practice and helping to rip apart the pseudo-positivity of the social order. This analysis of the dominion of the ruling class over social organization and of the attempts made by the popular class to establish a counterdominion requires for its completion an observation of the effects exerted by class relations at the level of consumption, which is to say of the transmission and reception of cultural goods as opposed to forms of social interaction.
Social Organization
283
Consumable objects and conducts are hierarchized in such a way as to reproduce the distinctions between the social classes. This mechanism operates in accordance with the two methods already indicated. On the one hand a break is created between the upper and the lower modes of consumption. Above, one finds invention, genius, pure wit, elegance, taste, all of which are both the product of individual gifts and the result of prolonged membership of an elite freed from lowly material cares: below, we find practical, repetitive activity permitting immediate gratifications. On the other hand a continuity is established from top to bottom, an unbroken downward gradation. The work of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron has thrown remarkable light upon this organized stratification. "High culture," vulgarized until it reaches the stage of radio and television games and quizzes, is downgraded from production to reproduction, from modern historical analysis to the crudest of narrative and chronological history, but always in such a way as to create a feeling of dependent participation in a higher social and cultural world, revered, imitated, and unchallenged. The popularization of culture must at the same time attract and repel the people. Attract it so that there is no risk of its challenging the class nature of the dominant culture; repel it so that it shall not feel capable of participating in anything but a mode of objects or at the most of techniques, without being able to rise further to the level of ideas and orientations. Claude Grignon, in L'ordre des choses (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1971), has made a very acute examination of technical education in French state schools from this point of view. Such education must be inferior, but it must not be different. The technician and the nurse must have some notions of general culture so that they can belong in the world dominated by the economic or medical rulers: but they must also be limited to technical operations, so that they never ask themselves questions about the functioning of production complexes, in order that the gap between elite and technicians be maintained—a gap that the latter find it easier to accept because another gap, just as large, is created at the same time between them and the mass, whether this consist of workers, patients, or students. But this class stratification does not lead solely to responses of pure conformity. Apart from dependent participation, two very different types of conduct are observable that also refer to the double dialectic of the social classes. On the one hand there is the reappropriation of cultural objects for the defensive maintenance of a popular culture based on both professional activity and on the preservation of old cultural values, and centered on the primary gToups, the family or the neighborhood. On the other hand, there is the use of objects of consumption in a "desocializing" way in an effort to reach the orientations of the system of historical action by leaping over the social order. This one might term the pursuit of opportunity, manifested by
284
Chapter Five
the cult of real or mythical heroes who have attained success without going through authority, influence, or membership of the upper class. This rage to live, stronger among the young, is fed both by participation and revolt and enables mass culture to overflow the popularization of high culture, while at the same time never being able to liberate itself from the dominion of the ruling class, which perpetually gathers it back "into the fold." This dominion is stronger in proportion as cultural consumption is more directly linked to the reproduction of a social domination and forms of social organization. It is less strong in the domain of the consumption of symbolic products when such consumption is not linked to professional roles. Here again, as in the previous analyses, one must not either be snared by the functionalist illusion of stratified participation in values or forget that the dominion of the dominant class does not entirely account for popular conduct, which always remains oriented—albeit often in degraded form—by the double effort of resistance and contestation. d.
Social Practice and the State
The categories of social practice are also determined by the political system, although we can limit ourselves here to two observations. First, the political system only appears to lend a unity to social practice. It does not have that role if it has no openness, if it is entirely subject to a hegemonic class, in other words, if it does not itself intervene as such. When it intervenes, it does so to the degree in which its elements of plurality resist the forces of unification, and also to the degree in which its own unity is weak, in which contractual mechanisms are added to the elaboration of laws, and in which it does not outlaw the action of social movements, organizational demands, and pressures exerted upon itself. Second, the political system, acting within a historically and geographically determined territorial whole, combines rules that are not sociologically interdependent, constitutes and defends a political order that is socially composite. The greater the intervention of the political system is the less deep-seated the unity it possesses. We must therefore conclude that social practice and what one might term a society's discourse has no unity, does not form a coherent whole that could be identified either with a body of societal values or with the domination of a ruling class. Sociology has used the notions of values, norms, and roles in a way that cannot be accepted. Social practice is not made up of role reciprocity and role expectations brought into harmony by a common reference to norms and thereby to values. This image may correspond to communities ultimately defined by the rules of their functioning alone, or inversely to voluntary
Social Organization
285
associations; it is not applicable to a society in which class relations and political relations have the greatest importance. The actors communicate within the framework of a system of historical action, of laws, of rules, but their interests do not chime together in any harmony. They are all seeking, at the political level, to increase their influence, to conduct their strategy, and also, at the class relations level, to defend themselves against an adversary while at the same time identifying themselves with societal orientations. In consequence, actors rarely play their roles, rarely conduct themselves, in accordance with what others expect of them. They cannot dissociate their organizational behavior from their strategic conduct and their class conduct. This overlapping and this noncoincidence are more accentuated in the agencies than in the administrations, are reduced to the minimum in total organizations, and are most evident of all in social exchanges outside the organization. If we consider the opposite hypothesis, that of a unity of social practice as an ideological whole, then we see that its realization presupposes a complete overlaying of the system of historical action and the political system by a class domination. This is not possible unless the dominant class is extremely dissociated from the ruling class, and consequently if the society is dominated by a hegemonic bloc of old and new dominant classes and thus deprived of all capability of managing its historicity. But this situation is that in which the categories of social practice are the least homogeneous, exactly like displays in a museum combining works from different societies and epochs. It is in just such a way that the religious culture of a traditionally Catholic region can combine into a constantly remodeled syncretism heritages as dissimilar as the buildings and art works of the Vatican. On the other hand, this social and cultural domination, even if it succeeds in imposing practices, is overflowed on every side by a historicity, by class relations, by political conduct that it can never succeed in stifling completely. We have just encountered once more the general idea or theme of ideology. It has already played a part in our analysis of the social classes, and we shall meet it again when dealing with social movements and social change. The moment has come to put some order into the very diverse uses to which this word is put. First let us set to one side the simplest and only clear meaning. Actors have an ideology. They represent a situation to themselves—a situation thaTIs always a whole composed of social interactions seen from their point of view—and reinterpret as the environment of their intentions what is in fact a relation of which they are one of the terms. It is in this sense that I have used the word ideology when associating it with the concept of Utopia. All systems of social interactions, whether it is a matter of class relations and their stake, of political relations, or of organizational relations, produce
286
Chapter Five
two types of representation in the actors: either they identify themselves with the social field in question and perceive their partners or adversaries as obstacles—which corresponds to a Utopia—or else they identify the social stake with themselves, as they perceive themselves in relation to their partners or adversaries. There exist ideologies and Utopias linked with organizational roles, with group interests, or with classes. Every observable ideology or Utopia on the organizational level also participates in a class ideology or class Utopia. But the ideology of the dominant class is also the dominant ideology. Thus we come back to the problem of an ideology of the system, of the social organization. And consequently we find introduced the idea of three levels of social reality: the economic, the political, and the ideological. This theme appears in many ways. In the first place, this trichotomy can be employed in order to distinguish the domains of social production, that of society's adaptation to change and that of reproduction—the first being defined in economic terms, the second in political terms, the third as that of ideology. Second, distinction can be made between societies in which social domination manifests itself in a directly economic form and those in which that domination presents itself in a form that is either primarily political or primarily ideological. Third, social action can be conducted by groupings defined by an economic situation or by the intermediary of political forces, or by that of ideological groups. To the first of these ideas it must be replied that the levels of analysis and of social reality cannot be identified with categories of social facts. The level of social production, which I term the level of historicity, is not that of economic facts, for it is the level of the cultural and social orientations of the system of historical action as well as that of class conflicts and ideologies. What sociology is dealing with, on this level as on all others, is not facts— economic, political, or cultural—but social interactions. The upper class always tends to be both ruling, which means it controls the production of society, and dominant, which means it ensures the reproduction of the established order and its own domination. These two orientations manifest themselves on all levels of social reality. Although 1 distinguish between three levels—the field of historicity, the political system, and the social organization—this representation must not be confused with a hierarchization of categories ofsocial facts. The second formulation is on the surface acceptable. In fact, it fits in very well with a great many schemata representing the transition from "traditional" societies to "modern" societies, from societies of transmission to societies of acquisition. These are acceptable ideas insofar as they indicate
Social Organization
287
the decline of metasocial warrants of the social order, but totally unacceptable if they go so far as to impose an image of evolution leading from irrationality to rationality, from a religious state to a positive state. Every mode of social domination is at the same time economic and ideological. The masters of bygone societies were not only god-kings or priests, they were first and foremost owners of the earth and men. The technocrats of the postindustrial era are not scientists but masters imposing their ideology. When shall we free ourselves completely from this tenacious sociocentrism that makes us see our own society as the last stage before the final entry into "nature/* into "reason," into "freedom/' into "the end of history?" If there is going to be an end to history, then it can only take the form of an event, whether of human or nonhuman origin, and not that of a return to a stable state free from all the agonies and aspirations of historicity. The third formulation reminds us quite rightly that the more a society is subjected to domination, the more too are social relations distorted, the more the class conflict is replaced by the clash of the constituted order and forces of contestation that attack it from outside, by what I shall term, in my last chapter, critical action as opposed to social movements. The trichotomy "economic, political, ideological" thus introduces the worst kinds of confusion. It suggests that there is a category of social facts corresponding to each of the levels I have distinguished: the field of historicity, the political system, and the social organization, whereas each of these levels must he defined as a system of social interactions. Class relations are situated on a level that is the same as that of economic relations and of ideologies, which is also a political locus insofar as the action of the state penetrates from the political system into the field of historicity. The political system also deals with economic interests and is animated by political ideologies that refer more or less directly to the class ideologies, while at the same time also pertaining in part to the internal rhetoric of the political system itself. Last, the social organization is the locus of an economic practice, while at the same time the organizations are dependent on the political system or also possess—in the case of enterprises and agencies— a political system of their owrn. It is equally the locus where the ideology of the dominant class tends to become an ideology of the system, the spirit of the categories of social practice, but in a way that is not absolutely constraining except in the domain of pure reproduction, in the graveyard of dead historicities. One cannot superimpose an ideological superstructure on top of an economic infrastructure without taking up a historicist viewpoint. In that case one can conceive of forces of production powering society as a whole. But one can just as well say that it is the ideas and values that power the social practices. In every case this evolutionism rests upon a philosophy of
288
Chapter Five
history, last avatar of the metasocial warrants of social order. Sociology cannot exist until after that moment when it has totally expelled the vitalism of material forces or of values, when it has begun conceiving of the whole of society in terms of social action and hence in terms of both practice and orientation, economy and ideology, indissolubly linked. The social organization can never be viewed as the simple concrete expression of a domination; it is linked to the field of historicity and therefore to the double dialectic of the social classes. Closed as a concrete organizational whole, it is open as the practice of historicity. Social organization alwrays presents two complementary aspects. On the one hand it represents the field of historicity, which is to say both the orientations of the system of historical action and class conflicts. On the other hand it is the expression of a domination. It is in this respect that it is the dominant ideology. But it can no more be reduced to that ideology than it can be to cultural orientations or, by contrast, to open class conflict. This is the meaning of the opposition between technique and power introduced at the beginning of this chapter as one of the fundamental dimensions of social organization. An organizational system or a political system has no more "positive" unity of content than the system of historical action has. All the social systems are modes of historicity's dominion over functioning and are dominated by the tensions between the two aspects of class relations: conflict and domination. This is why in all the organizations one can and must seek out the tensions between the elements of the system and the conflicts between the actors. Does there then exist no unifying agent of the categories of social practice? YesT there is such an agent: the state. The state is what links field of historicity, political system, and social organization together. A powerful state dominates the political system, intervenes in the field of historicity by substituting itself to a greater or lesser degree for the social classes, regulates social practice through the intermediary of its apparatus, which can include agencies and enterprises as well as administrations. If the state is not simply the disguise of a dominant and hegemonic coalition, then it is capable of planning a society, of regulating its relations of authority, the forms of its division of labor, its educational programs, its mode of occupying space, in a systematic manner. But this powerfulness on the part of the state does not make it possible to say that the whole formed by the categories of social practice is thereby made homogeneous. On the contrary, the interventionist or planning state incorporates within it a variety of practical demands; it acts in the name of the popular classes, even though its action is pursued more in the interest of the ruling classes. It imposes its
Social Organization
289
own interests and representations, which are linked with the intersocial relations in which it is engaged; in particular, it mobilizes a national consciousness reinforced by foreign relations, and this is the most heterogeneous aggregate of all, taking its inspiration without distinction as it does from Joan of Arc and Robespierre, from Peter the Great and Lenin, from Washington and Lincoln. A totalitarian state does not create the society most integrated around a body of values. It imposes conformity, but a conformity with principles and rules that are at the same time heterogeneous and changeable. State absolutism reigns in such a society over a social and cultural junkshop. The greatest integrating capacity is found in a state that is able to combine its role as leader of development and its capacity to mobilize the popular classes with all their cultural baggage. What one has then is a state-social movement, a revolutionary state, the state of the year II, of the Soviets, or of the Cuban or Chinese revolutions. And in that case we are a long way away from ^Gramsci*s idea of civil society, When the state, in Italy or in France, integrates the interests and ideologies of the ruling classes, or of the upper layers of the underdeveloped regions, with those of the modernizing centers of the economy and society, giving much more importance in both countries to the "Southern intellectuals, " it succeeds in unifying the social organization to a certain degree, but its success can never be more than partial, tending to be limited to the creation of a state ideology, while the heterogeneity of society and social practices remains untouched. We are still further away from the situation characterized by the omnipotence of a ruling class. It is always necessary to search out the dominion of the ruling class and to demonstrate its presence beyond the socially abstract language of society's regulations and administration. In fact it is one of sociology's most useful activities to unmask the false objectivity or the false technicality of the social organization, but this effort must not be confined to only one of its aspects, however important. What must also be sought out and made visible is the system of historical action and the dominion of the ruling class, as well as the counterdominion of the popular class and the composite action of the political system. This will make clear the gap that separates the social organization from its reproduction. Analysis of the first refers onward to the system of historical action and toward the social classes, via the forms of economic activity and of organizational power. Reproduction, on the contrary, can only be a concerted action directed at the maintenance of the social order, which is to say of a concrete historical whole, in which class domination, political power and authority are intermingled. Reproduction can therefore never be the work oj"
290
Chapter Five
a dominant class alone. It can only be realized by the state, when it is in the service of a hegemony and of the conservation of privilege. The dominant class always seeks to reproduce its domination. But it is prevented from doing so efficaciously to the degree in which it is also a ruling class. It is the state that can separate rulers and dominants by the fusing of dominant classes or class fractions and by organizing a technical and ideological apparatus of reproduction. Obviously the principal instruments of social reproduction are the organs of socialization. In industrialized societies the ruling class, while making use of the school system to its advantage, is at the same time mistrustful of it because it is linked with the state and because, in consequence, it is sen'ing middle classes possessing a political influence as much as it does the old dominant classes and their cultural heritage. Reproduction is therefore a program of political and ideological action effected under the direction of the state, one of whose functions it is. The more societies are capable of rapid changes, the further reproduction is removed from being a simple conservation of an established state. It is reaction, struggle against social change. The upper class, therefore, and the popular class too, have an increasing difficulty in this type of society in managing the relations between their offensive, ruling, or contestatory conduct on the one hand and their defensive conduct on the other, this latter being that of reproducing the social order in the case of the dominant class and reproducing a class culture, and more broadly still a dominated culture, in the case of the popular class. In a society with strong social warrants it is not the power of the dominant class only that is reproduced but the whole of the field of historicity, the transformation of which is very slow. In industrialized societies, on the contrary, there is a dissociation between the transforming action of the ruling class and a process of reproduction that maintains the privileges of the dominant class but is more directly linked to the action of the state. In neither of these cases can the social order be intensified with the domination of the upper class. It is never possible to break the interdependence of the orientations of the system of historical action and class relations. e.
Discourse, Ideology, and Rhetoric
The whole made up by the practices and the representations within an organization or within the social organization has no unity of its own. Such discourse can and must always be broken down in such a way as to reveal all the levels of society's functioning—historicity, politics, organizations—and all the levels of actors—class, political, organizational. The unity introduced by the state is more that of container than of content. But it is impossible for an organization—or for an institution—not to seek to establish its own unity.
Social Organization
291
not to define its ''spirit/' It therefore produces a specific rhetoric. And this rhetoric reverses the order that I have followed in my analysis. Instead of stressing the organization's dependence in relation to the higher levels of society, it presents it as an independent actor acting in the name of its principles, of its cohesion, and of its survival. This rhetoric always has two aspects, one justificatory, the other polemical. The first is necessary because an organization, torn between its history and its historicity, must assert its autonomy, justify its existence, provide itself with a vocation and a mission. The polemical aspect stems from the fact that any organization is in competition with others, which are either threatening it directly or seeking to improve their own relative position in relation to its own. This rhetoric increases in strength proportionately with the organizations autonomy. It develops more easily in an enterprise than in an administration and more easily still in an agency than in an enterprise. The rhetoric of the organizations is thus the opposite of a state ideology or of the ideologies of the social classes. It evolves within socioprofessional groups that are not clearly linked either to the main social classes or to the state's economic action. The most conspicuous case is that of school or university rhetoric, which I discussed as it occurs in the United States in my book Universite et socie'tt aux Etats-Unis (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1972). It tends as a general rule to assert the primacy oifa professional role, seen as being in the service of the general interest, independent of social conflicts and political struggles, champion of both order and movement, past and present, the individual and the collectivity, and basis of an esprit de corps. Talcott Parsons and G. M. Piatt, in "Considerations on the American Academic System" (Minerva 4 [1968], pp. 497-523), have provided a verydetailed analysis of the professionalism of American universities, which is also attachment to the autonomy of the university organization. But an analyst identifying himself less with the actor cannot be satisfied with such a description. Rhetoric plays an ambiguous role. On the one hand it conceals the dependence of an organization in relation to the higher levels of society and especially in relation to the dominant class. Professionalism is a convenient way of not posing the problem of power and of not asking oneself questions about the nature of the social and political choices that govern professional activity, its financing as well as its forms of organization. This is why the student movement fought against professionalism, which has often felt itself more threatened by such contestation than by its links with the power elite. Nevertheless, professionalism also carries within it a will to defend itself against power. Theleachers are suspicious of the state, of big business, of the armed forces. They howl with protest at the slightest subordination of the educational organization to external objectives.
292
Chapter Five
The situation is scarcely any different in France, where the link between teachers and state is more direct, but where one finds the same determination to be seen as occupying a place in the center of society, halfway between powerholders and people, and the same sheltering behind principles, regulations, and an extreme degree of professionalization. It is just as impossible to accept this rhetoric at its face value, forgetting the dependence of the organizations, as it is to treat it as merely a complement to the ideology of the ruling class, as if teachers—to take a specific case—were in fact serving the interests of the ruling class increasingly well by asserting themselves to be independent, and as if they were fulfilling the social function of maintaining the social order with ever greater efficiency the more they shelter behind abstract notions such as liberalism, humanism, and professionalism. Rhetoric is the specific characteristic of the "middle strata," whose links with class relations are sufficiently indirect for them to be able simultaneously to serve the ruling class, feel sympathy with the popular class, and above all defend their own professional and organizational independence. Hence the growing importance today of the rhetoric of the management staff in large enterprises, especially in those that are closest to being agencies. Cut off from top management, at a remove from the workers, they tend to identify themselves with the enterprise and with their professional interests. It is rare for them to side with the workers, less and less usual for them to feel themselves to be in collaboration with the employers. They produce a rhetoric that speaks both of growth and of participation in order to give more autonomy to the enterprises of which they feel themselves the best qualified champions. The discourse of an organization is therefore never reduced to a rhetoric: it is fashioned even more by the ideology of the dominant class and also includes the discordant voice of popular ideology. This separation between ideologies and rhetoric is connected with the twofold nature of the organizations: they implement the orientations and social relations of a field of historicity and the decisions of the political system; they are also autonomous units reinforced by their historical and geographical particularisms. It is futile trying to reduce the superimposition of all these components to a unity, and consequently to endow the categories of \ social practice with an integration they cannot possess. Is it possible to detect a cultural rhetoric, analogous to the social rhetoric that evolves within the organizations? Such an attempt seems reasonable, since cultural practices, especially in our type of society, are more and more the product of large organizations. The educational system, the organs of the press, radio, or television, all put out programs that are indeed the output of organizations more or less akin, according to the individual case, to an agency, an enterprise, or an administration, and that often belong to all three of those types at once. But this parallelism is in part artificial. The rhetoricians of an organization act upon it from within; they have the
Social Organization
293
capacity partly to determine a production unit's mode of functioning. Here, on the contrary, if their action exists then it must be in direct delation with a public that has the power to either receive or not receive the cultural product being put out, and that public is not organized. We do not use the term t4 mass media" to denote Firm's own newsletters, school textbooks, or radio programs put out by an organization purely for its members. We must therefore take a different path to reach cultural rhetoric, while still maintaining the general definition of rhetoric as a whole. It is formed, it seems to me, by the conjuncture of two constituents. On the one hand it occurs, like all rhetoric, within social "reality" as it appears, which is to say within the social order. It is seeking what it likes to call a mass audience, by which it means the domain of opinions viewed as responses to a set of stimuli of which the social nature and significance are not questioned. On the other hand, it is constantly talking in the name of "needs" and demands. The social and cultural field is constantly being transformed, giving rise to the appearance of new demands, but public opinion always remains just as conditioned as ever by all the organs of social and cuhural reproduction, with the result that rhetoric is constantly stressing freedom, spontaneity, what people "really want," something that market research is increasingly able to reveal. Public opinion is to a large extent determined by the dominant ideology, but the more it is, the less place there is for rhetoric. Reading the Soviet press is an excellent way of finding out the views of that society's rulers, but a very bad way of trying to isolate the autonomous contribution made by Russian journalists. Similarly, the messages being transmitted through advertising, in capitalist countries, are essentially the ideological propaganda of private enterprise. An autonomous contribution by rhetoric can exist only when one places oneself in the position of the consumer and his choices, asking no questions about the system of historical action, class domination, or the political decisions that govern the forms of consumption, but simply concentrating on the initiative and satisfaction of the consumer. This is why the language of the rhetoricians constantly mingles references to a world of objects, of cultural data, with references to human nature, to good will, to abstract rights, to what is acceptable or unacceptable to the consumers. What it excludes totally is the definition of social relations, the search for causes, for events, or for mechanisms of decision. Here again rhetoric is at the same time a means of concealing the determinants of social and cultural practice and a means of creating a gap between consumer and the dominion of ideology. Cultural transmissions cannot be reduced to rhetoric. They have no more unity of content than organizational practice, except in the case when a totalitarian state is linking the various levels of society together completely. The dominant ideology exerts its dominion over them, in accordance with the forms just analyzed.
294
Chapter Five
The ideology of the popular classes can make its voice heard in them too, more weakly it is true, but increasingly as the political system is more open. Rhetoric has its place in them too, which makes the formers of opinion into a "middle" category not reducible to that of the agencies transmitting the dominant ideology. I am laying so much stress on this low degree of integration to be observed in social and cultural practices, because, if one represents them as being entirely unified, either by values or by dominant interests, as both right- and left-wing functionalism would have it, it is no longer possible to understand how social movements can form and manifest themselves. If the universities are purely bourgeois and simply responsible for maintaining a class inheritance, then I don't understand how a student movement can have come into being. If public opinion is wholly molded by propaganda, then I don't see how movements can arise within it. Social practice is the plane upon which, simultaneously, we find projected the orientations of the system of historical action, class relations, the unity and plurality of the political system, and the complexity of a historical situation. It is this diversity in the origins of the rules and messages that lends a certain autonomy to rhetorics, an autonomy that it would be absurd to think of as limitless. It cannot be separated from its subordination to all the forms of the ruling class's power and dominion. It is an indirect agent of integration and exclusion; but it exists only because social practice is not entirely integrated and dominated. The rhetoricians are on the fringe of the great social conflicts without ever being completely neutral, but their existence shows that such conflicts are not impossible. f.
Social Systems >
This study of organizations, and of what overflows them in the social organization—that is, the direct determination of social practice by the orientations of the system of historical action, class relations, and the political system—completes the body of material formed by the first five chapters of this book. Our analysis began with historicity, followed its transformation into a system of historical action and into the stake of class relations, then moved down to the level of concrete collectivities, first of all that of the political system whose existence is linked with that of a territorial society, then that of the organizations, autonomous units of decision, bounded by precise frontiers, possessing a scale of authority of their own and characterized by their own particularities in time and space. The autonomy of the political system and the organizations derives primarily from the fact that their content is never reduced to a field of historicity, that they combine within themselves agents, rules, and conduct that belong to various systems of historical action and various systems of class relations. It derives also, within a synchronic analysis, from the fact that the
Social Organization
295
systems whose concatenation constitutes the field of historicity possess neither unity of orientations and values nor an instrument of social control. The elements of the system of historical action are defined by their oppositions and their complementarities at the same time. What is called the spirit of a civilization is not the unifying principle of a system of historical action but an ideological creation, the sole function of which is to paper over the disintegration of the system or to mask its true nature by identifying it more or less retrospectively with the interests and the representations of the ruling class. The system of class relations is characterized both by the domination of the ruling class and by the resistance or the contestation produced by the popular class. It can never be reduced to an absolute power, as though society were no more than a vast organization being manipulated in the dark by a wicked genie. From all this two general ideas emerge. 1. My analysis refuses to view society as a simple system, since it defines what is usually referred to as the social structure as a system of systems. Society is not an organization, is not the whole formed by means corresponding either to a body of values or to the action of a social power. What constitutes a unified whole is the state, not society. The state can be seen as capable of weighing its objectives, organizing the making of decisions and negotiation between political forces, of organizing its activities. This is why sociology has had such great difficulty in freeing itself from the idea that its object is the study of the state, its laws, its institutions, its doctrine, and in freeing itself also of the dominion of the state itself which tends to demand of the sociologist that he shall be a modern Royal Historiographer. One of the most obvious aspects of this book is its determined attempt to shift analysis away from this state-centeredness, by starting out from the system of historical action and the social classes and then by asserting the priority of a study of the political system over that of the state. This orientation is a continuation of the constant effort of social thought and sociology since Saint-Simon, Tocqueville, and Marx. The role of the state is essential, but it cannot be understood other than as a striving toward the practical integration of the different social systems, which are of different natures. The organizational system is the management of a set of means, of internal and external relations, in terms of objectives. Those objectives must be taken to have been established at the moment one begins one's study of the organization. " Piloting" an organization consists in maintaining an instant-by-instant comparison of the required values of all the components on the one hand and the observed values on the other, then switching in feedback mechanisms that will keep the second set matched to
296
Chapter Five
the first. An organization is situated in an environment that it does not entirely control and whose variations it must take into account in defining its objectives. The political system is not a "piloted" system but a field of goal or objective formation. One cannot distinguish completely between its ends and its means. Political means are instruments for the determination of the ends that are imposed on organizations. This system is not governed by norms, for it produces them, or at least it produces laws and regulations. It does not rest upon authority but upon influence, upon strategies, and proceeds by means of transactions and negotiations, insofar, at least, as these are compatible with the domination exerted by the ruling class. The functioning of the political system is defined by its adaptation not to an environment but to the changing relations between the political forces and the more individualized interest groups that act through the political forces as intermediaries. The system of historical action constitutes, produces the field of social experience. It has no internal organization that enables it to arrive at decisions. The importance acquired by the sociology of decisions must not make us forget that they are almost never the prime determinant of social organization. The deciders are determined by the system of historical action and by class relations; they do not simply decide in the manner of a sovereign. Has it not been rightly said that politics is the art of the possible? At the level of the system of historical action it is impossible to speak of environment, for environment is defined by the action a society exerts upon itself, by its historicity, by its capacity to transcend its functioning and to define its own type of development, not arbitrarily, but on the basis of its cultural model, its accumulation, and its mode of knowledge. Class relations cannot be separated from the system of historical action. The classes are not the actors in social organization and are even less defined by their relation to the state. They are the actors of historicity, locked in a struggle for the control of the system of historical action and of historicity, which sets an upper class against a popular class. System of functioning, system of adaptation, system of creation—the three levels of society are all systems different from one another in nature, and their concatenation is not regulated by a sovereign authority but simply managed by the state within the framework of a concrete and therefore heterogeneous societal unit. 2. This analysis views society as a system of systems of social action. It asserts the hierarchy of social systems and the determination of social organization and the political system by the field of historicity, but it sees this latter not as a situation but as a set of orientations of action and of relations between actors. Sociology does not discover its true object until it rids itself of two oppositions that can have no meaning for it: that of situation and actor.
Social Organization
297
and that of objective and subjective. To these two false oppositions I add another, one that translates the first two into the terms of sociological analysis itself: the opposition of explanation and comprehension. Social organization is not determined in the last instance by a body of values or by a state of forces of production. The cultural model is not an idea but the consciousness of a creativity that one cannot define other than as work upon work, the product of knowledge and accumulation. Neither cultural models, nor the other elements of the historical system, nor class relations, are forms of social organization; they are forms of society's action upon itself. They can never be defined outside an economic activity and economic relations, any more than they can be reduced, in the positivist tradition, to a material state of society. As it moves down from the system of historical action until it reaches social organization, analysis is not making a transition from an objective situation into the domain of social consciousness and ideology. The system of historical action is a system of orientations, of culturally and socially orientecT conducts, and it is at the level of class relations that ideologies are formed. Inversely, social organization is a set of practices, of forms and techniques of labor. At the summit of the analysis we find the production of labor, oriented by the system of historical action and put into effect by class relations; at the verybottom we find the organization of labor and the values or norms that organizational power seeks to impose. The system capable of producing its finalities governs that which adapts them to demands and in its turn governs the organizational system that imposes ends upon means. This is why sociological analysis cannot separate the explanation of the systems from the comprehension of the actors; for the systems bring orientations into relation, while the actors are nothing other than the agents of the system.
90CUL /I/O/EVENTS
A. Four Kinds of Collective Conduct Society must not be taken for what it is, for its forms of organization and its rules of functioning. What appears as the framework for social behavior is in reality the always limited, fragile, badly integrated result of the conflicts and the transactions that occur between the classes and the social forces derived from them and that are the actors of a society's historicity, actors that animate and interpret a society's system of historical action, which is to say its social and cultural field of development. If one means by social conduct nothing but the interplay of the actors within a given institutional and organizational framework, then the notion of the social movement becomes incomprehensible, for social movements belong to the processes by which a society produces its organization on the basis of its system of historical action and via class conflicts and political transactions. By social movements 1 understand, in essence, the conflict action of agents of the social classes struggling for control of the system of historical action. But it is difficult to abstract this type of collective conduct from the observable reality with which all the levels of analysis are intermixed. Can one speak of a working-class movement, defined by its struggle against capitalism for the control of industrial development, without taking into consideration research into the institutional system, which is to say specifically the degree and form of institutional methods of dealing with labor conflicts, or without considering the effects of economic crises, professional mobility, or the organization of enterprises? 298
Social Movements
299
But before studying the interaction of various types of collective conduct it is first necessary to make a clear distinction between class conflict, resistance to authority, and pressure on the institutional system. And this comes to the same thing as distinguishing between the kinds of collective conduct that correspond to the system of historical action, the institutional system, and the organizational system. The essential part of my analysis will then be devoted to a study of social movements, which are the collective conduct of historicity. Lastly, it will be necessary to consider the projection of the social movements onto the level of the institutional system and, above all, onto that of social organization, and therefore the transformation of the social conflict into struggle against established power. The most urgent task is to learn to recognize the various kinds of collective conduct in practice. Too often we in fact find opposing general interpretations: for some, the student movement is to be explained by the crisis in the universities, which are organized in a manner no longer in harmony with society as a whole, while society is asking them to produce new "officer material"; for others, it is above all the bureaucratic rigidity of a decisionmaking system that must be challenged, and that is denounced in terms of accusations against ministerial bureaucracy and the corporatism of the teachers; for others still, the student movement reveals and gives life to a new class conflict. Such discussions, however suggestive, cannot lead to any result unless one defines at the outset the characteristics of the types of collective conduct that reveal either a class conflict, an institutional blockage, or an organizational crisis. At the point we have reached in our analysis it is now possible to effect such distinctions. a.
Conduct Characteristic of Organizational Crisis
Actors are situated first of all within a social organization. Any collective action presupposes the existence of an actor, of other actors who are bearers of interests differing from his, and of a social field in which their interactions occur. How can we define the elements at the organizational level more precisely? 1. The members of an organization who put forward claims are defining themselves in two ways, from the inside and from the outside of the organization. On the one hand they fill a certain position and they consider that since they make a certain contribution, they ought to receive a just remuneration, which is to say one in accordance with the relative level of their contribution. On the other hand, the organization is only one particular social milieu,
300
Chapter Six
one in which the actor is only partially engaged. He therefore acts within it in terms of his other roles and his personal interests as a whole. The rise in prices is not the responsibility of the individual enterprise or organization, but it provokes claims and conflicts within them. Social or professional mobility creates situations in which the actor's professional role is more directly engaged, but which cannot be reduced to it, which is another important form of the influence of external factors upon organizational conduct. This duality of the actor's position, setting him both inside the organization and outside facing it, is in opposition to the unity of a class position, which defines the identity of the actor in a social movement. 2. The claim is addressed to a clearly defined interlocutor, the person who holds authority and, beyond that, power. But if we limit the analysis to the specifically organizational level, then the "chief appears at the same time omnipotent and almost totally lacking control over his decisions, since he is only the person who brings objectives and means into relation in the name of norms, and also in that of a certain strategy with regard to an environment that is in fact a set of constraints upon the organization. With the result that any claim must first place itself within limits defined both by those constraints and by the nature of the power itself. Hence the discontinuity of claims, their "nibbling" aspect, and a constant see-sawing between a very limiting "realism'* and an overflowing of the organizational framework that can even lead to the formation of a social movement. 3. The field of the conflict is the organization itself; the claim is in this sense always oriented toward disorganization and toward reorganization. It disorganizes since it modifies the previous scheme of things; but it is aimed at a reorganization, for it has no true force except when it is protesting against disorganization and crisis. The person threatened with unemployment, underemployment, or redundancy, who protests against arbitrary treatment or bad working conditions and wages, while at the same time accusing management, wants to protect the organization in which he works and thus guarantee his own future. The miner subjected to a life of back-breaking toil still fights against the closedown of his pit for fear of being out of a job. Thus the organizational claim is the prisoner of the organization, and even appeals to the interests of the organization against those of the power that manages it or those of the external forces that act upon it. It is difficult in this case for a collective action to come into being oriented toward a transformation of the social order. Such an action can only come into being if, beyond the crisis of the organization, power is being challenged. On the other hand it frequently happens that a social movement gives rise to crisis behavior, or draws strength from it. An economic crisis, the threat or
Social Movements
301
the reality of unemployment, unleash collective behavior that is not always associated with a challenging of power and that is different froln a social movement, which is to say from a class conflict challenging the control of the system of historical action. The student movement in France during recent years was strongly associated with crisis conduct. It was in the arts faculties, with very uncertain job opportunities ahead, with a teaching curriculum inherited from the liberal society and even from older societies still, that the movement developed most easily. If it comes into being in isolation, this type of collective conduct can only be oriented toward the reconstitution of the social system affected by the cnsis._Jt is t o s u c n conduct—and not to social movements—that one must apply the definition given by Neil Smelser in his Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1963): "A noninstitutionalized mobilization for an action whose aim is to modify one or several types of tension on the basis of the generalized reconstitution of one component of the action/' The movement increases in importance, according to this author, as the crisis affects a more fundamental component of the action, which is to say, in order of decreasing importance: values, norms, participation in organizations, and use of technical resources. In response to the crisis there occurs the effort to reconstruct society, to restore its principles and its functioning. There is an endeavor to find the way back to a "normal" situation, to recover lost positions, the integration of the collectivity, the rules of the social game, the principles animating culture. Sometimes the collective conduct is not aimed at a return to a previous equilibrium: it can display confidence in the future. It is only a crisis, some people will say, and as soon as reason returns a new equilibrium wrill be found, preserving the essential values and answering better to the requirements of the present time than the old system, which was worn out or has been distorted by external pressures that must bear the responsibility for the crisis. In every case, viewed in itself, the crisis manifests itself by fragmentation, by anomic behavior, by demoralization, by withdrawal, by apathy, or—in contrast—by rebellion against an obsolete, over-rigid organization, incapable of answering the needs of modern society. In all three types of conduct—restoration, anornie, modernization—the actor faces the social system directly, without the intervention of conflicts between actors who are defined by their opposition. The actor is defined within an organization; he refers himself to its rules, its customs, its needs. He challenges injustice, incompetence, irrationality. The actor himself is not very clearly defined, since each individual can act in terms of several membership groups and several roles. The crisis is experienced as non-meaning, not as the result of an adverse action. Positions are arrived a: as "obvious" responses to the crisis, and, like light projected onto a
302
Chapter Six
broken mirror and reflected in all directions, the image of the order to be reestablished is often incoherent and leads to the simultaneous presentations of contradictory assertions or objectives. The action that occurs is more a sharp break, either forward or backward, than a transformation. It is therefore difficult to organize, and the specific characteristic of crisis conduct is its discontinuity, the swift succession of excitement and depression, of far-ranging programs and apathetic indifference. Every popular class carries on an action that is defensive at the same time as it is contestatory. But it can happen that the link between these two slopes of its movement snaps or is absent, and that a purely defensive action results that then becomes a conduct of organizational crisis. But many collective actions are too hurriedly placed in this category. A rural collectivity affected by the penetration of mercantile capitalism is often subject to a messianic movement or some other form of uprising. It is insufficient to see this as a defense reaction on the part of a community struggling against its own disintegration. Very often, on the contrary, one can see it as an effort directed both at reappropriating the process of modernization and at struggling against a still distant and ill-defined adversary. The messiah is not merely the person imposing the return to a former more or less idealized situation, but rather the person who is attempting to transform those undergoing the change into actors. In which case what is taking place is a social movement and not just a simple reaction to social disorganization, a confused form of class struggle and not a tradition-bound integrating mechanism. What distinguishes the two types of collective conduct is the fact that the social movement alone has the capacity to mobilize a group or collectivity for a struggle against an adversary and for the control of change, whereas reaction to an organizational crisis can only be directed toward the inside of a collectivity. It becomes, on this account, wholly heteronomous in its political action, or else, on the contrary, dominated by a will to 4,recapture lost ground," an impulse toward increased social participation, which is also heteronomous. This dissociation of inside and outside, substituting itself for the theme of conflict, is the sign by which one can recognize an organizational crisis and the absence of a social movement. b.
Institutional Tensions
The output of the institutional system consists of decisions defining the framework within which the organizations act. The actors are social forces attempting to exert a certain influence on the decisions that will be imposed on a collectivity. The action of a social force is therefore defined by four fundamental components. In the first place, recognition of the limits of the field of decision. A union
Social Movements
303
negotiating with employers cannot have the suppression of capitalism as its objective. That suppression may be the orientation of the labor movement, but no industrialization of labor conflicts exists except insofar as the labor movement and union action are not wholly identical. The union does not renounce the orientations of the labor movement when it enters into negotiation, but it only possesses any influence on decisions because its socially transforming action is indirect and limited. In the second place, a social force—an interest group or a pressure group—aims at improving its relative position in relation to other social forces within the influence system. In the third place, each social force works out a complex strategy since its interests are at least as differentiated as the societal problems with which the political system is coping. A pressure group is only a weak social force because it has only a single function and arrives at a complex strategy in a different way. It can only act by sheer vociferousness and aggressive activity. If the actors of the institutional system were all pressure groups, then that system would disintegrate. In the last place, the action of a social force is always directed toward a decision to be taken. The role of members of a legislature is to pass or not to pass laws, that of a municipal council—which is also an executive organ—is to decide on the use to be made of local resources. A collective negotiation within an enterprise is aimed at altering the use being made of resources and the exercise of authority. This description of institutional action is too limited, however; it does not take into consideration anything outside the area in which the institutions are effective. Yet every institutional system is limited, every claim is not negotiated, all social interests are not represented. Certain kinds of collective conduct are responses to the blockage or closedness of the institutional system. In France, the state has almost always refused to negotiate with the unions over wages. In the universities, the most advanced countries economically had until very recently almost no system for the representation of students. In the Roman church there is still almost no recognized institutional system. In all these cases decision and authority are identified, and opposition tends to pass without transition from organizational claims to a direct contestation of social domination. But there also exist protest movements opposing the blockage itself and directed at opening the political system up: it is the imposition of values and norms, the refusal of authoritarian or bureaucratic rulers or managers to negotiate that are attacked. Such an action is reforming in nature; it is calling for a necessary modernization and often stresses the positive effects of conflict on social integration wrhen recognized and dealt with; at the same time it challenges the heritage of the past and vested rights. What are the distinctive features of pressure on the institutional system?
304
Chapter Six
One is bound here to find the attributes of a social force. A pressure movement accepts certain limits, demands participation in decision making, is defined by the real capacity of influence; its action is therefore directed toward and against the institution. Workers strike in order to obtain recognition of the reality of the union and to impose the opening of negotiations. The beginning of the student movement at Nanterre in 1967 was marked by a strike aimed at obtaining student participation in the application of the Fouchet reforms, specifically in order to rescue certain categories of students from what were believed to be the harmful and unjust effects of that reform. Such pressure can be aimed at obtaining institutional treatment of certain claims. It can also be a reaction against the blockage or the fragmentation of the institutional system and thus produce and lend strength to an antiinstitutional uprising. These two types of conduct must be clearly distinguished. The internal problems of the social organization and its functioning are associated with the problems—different by nature—of power, which is to say, of the projection onto the social organization of the relations of domination. But the problems of the institutional system's functioning, expressed by such words as rigidity, blockage, and so on, cannot be identified with those of hegemony, which reveal the dominion of social domination over the institutional system. Institutional pressure often has as actor the lower strata or elements threatened by the upper class. They demand equality, oppose themselves to the monopolizing of wealth and political power by the great landowners. Their action is much more political than social, since they do not constitute the popular class of the society under consideration. Such was the case with the small landowners in Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries, those of Athens in particular, who rose against the power of the owners of the large estates who were a threat to them: they demanded more equality and supported the tyrants in their anti-aristocratic action. At a remove of many centuries, the petty bourgeoisie, in England and France, likewise demanded that measures be taken against wealth and for public education so as to equalize opportunities. In the first case, these small landowners cannot be identified with slaves, since they were citizens; in the second, the petty bourgeoisie cannot be identified with the working class, whose social movement was then being organized. Such movements can be extreme in the methods of government they advocate or support; they are nonetheless "moderate" as far as their action on class relations is concerned. There is no lack of ideologists, nowadays particularly, who deny the existence of class conflicts and social movements and see nothing in them but the effect of institutional blockages. Let the state and the enterprises only become good strategists, capable of rational calculation, knowing at every
Social Movements
305
moment how to negotiate the optimum conditions of adaptation to a changing environment, and pragmatic transactions will replace dogmatic confrontations. I am not setting one ideology up against another. I am simply asserting that the collective conduct that is a response to the dysfunctioning of the institutional system is not of the same nature, does not have the same attributes, as social movements challenging the domination of the system of historical action. Nothing could be more arbitrary than to assert the meaning of a historical event or a voluntary association. Comparative analysis must be our shield against such simpleminded attempts. The rigidity of the French institutional system is certainly an important element in the situation that led to* the explosion in May 1968. But what about the American universities? They were not suffering from a similar rigidity and centralism, yet they produced a student movement not unrelated to that which occurred in France or in Italy. Before recomposing the event and the connections between diverse problems and forms of collective conduct, we must first unravel them analytically. This is a task made all the more difficult and all the more necessary by the fact that the sociologist tends to place himself inside a social whole, usually his own society, and like all social actors is more easily able to represent to himself the "concrete" problems of that social whole's functioning than its reference to cultural orientations or a class domination that cannot be recognized except by an effort of abstraction. 1. Thus, starting from the legitimate isolation of organizational conduct, one passes easily to the claim that social actors are defined solely by their position in the social organization and, more concretely, their position within social stratification and mobility. The lowest strata then appear as both conservative and dependent, ultimately as passive. They participate only very slightly in the creation of values andsocialexchanges; they are not innovative, their behavior is rigid. The upper strata, on the contrary, display more "elective" conduct, devote a larger proportion of their resources to things other than subsistence, are more capable of welcoming innovations, which are more easily incorporated into their more diversified and more flexible type of conduct. On the other hand, the lowest categories are more heterogeneous, less capable of collective action and also more responsive to a desire for individual ascent. This type of analysis does, however, encounter types of conduct that I think belong to other levels of society's functioning: the political system and class relations. It then invents notions whose purpose is to get around this change of viewpoint. If it observes protests, it says either that they are aimed at the reestablishment of the previous social order and that they are resisting the
306
Chapter Six
effort of the upper strata to conduct the necessary changes rationally and in stages, or else it says that they are anomic reactions to crisis, simple forms of social disintegration. The sociological attitude I have just briefly described is not a neutral one. It is conservative, for it takes the established order as its starting point: "things being as they are"; differences are "empirically" observed between strata or between categories defined by their mobility, which comes to the same thing as proving that those who are at the top or who want to get there are effectively * Superior" to those below. Everything that departs from this schema is merely disorder, resistance to change, or a return to the past. The extreme form of this conservative sociology is that which takes upon itself the viewpoint of the state. The holders of power have the initiative; the people is merely an inorganic, fickle, authoritarian mass which is divided between marginality, escape into Utopian countersocieties, and intolerant conformism. 2. Those who look at things from the viewpoint of the political system do not construct the same picture of social conduct. They are more responsive to the "limited rationality7' of interests and strategies, to transactions and negotiations. But they assert, like conservative sociology, that the higher one moves in the social hierarchy, the greater the capacity for political action grows, and the greater the complexity of the strategies and alliances, with the result that change is the work of the most influential, whereas the people are more rigid. If it is observed that transformations are provoked by the action of the popular classes, then this liberal sociology answers that in the first place nothing could be less certain. The people does intervene, true, but for one thing it is not the cause of the change, since that was produced solely by a conflict taking place in the heart of the ruling elite, and for another it cannot orient it, merely contenting itself with temporarily occupying the power vacuum and increasing either the disorder or the rigidity of the political system, provoking reactions that render change more difficult and more costly. 3. Sociology can take up its stance on the level of historicity and in particular on that of class relations. But it always runs the risk of presenting the historical actors it deals with as real collectivities. Hence the image of a progressivist peasant or worker class, exclusively animated by a will to liberty and equality, that becomes a permanent cultural feature rather than the expression of a social movement against domination and privilege. To the observations of conservative and liberal sociology, this progressivist sociology answers that if progress is not always identifiable with liberty, that is because it is taken over by traitors, bad shepherds or bad councillors, defenders of former privileges or monopolizers of the general interest. Which leads to an
Social Movements
307
ever more powerful appeal to virtue, to social integration, and thus reinforces the weight of the state and the dominant ideology. These distortions of an analysis that identifies one of the levels of society with society's functioning as a whole invariably lead sociology into becoming an auxiliary either of an order based on principles or traditions, or of an elitist control of change, or else of the setting up of a new social organization and new class relations. And this leads us to two conclusions. The first is that sociological analysis can never identify itself with the management of society and even less with the state. This is why power, whatever its form, is mistrustful of sociology, because it criticizes instead of justifying, distinguishes instead of integrating. However, power is only too glad to call upon sociology to help it combat deviancy, reinforce socialization, eliminate archaisms. And power will tolerate it more easily when it is itself not very integrated, subject to crises of change or adaptation. Sociology receives better treatment in pluralist political systems than in "monopolistic*' ones; it is defended more strongly by social movements when they are still forming or when they are contestatory than when they are near to gaining power; it is listened to more by categories whose statuses lack congruence or are unstable than by the extremes of the social scale. The second conclusion is that one must choose between the fragmentation of sociological analysis and its independence. Fragmentation signifies that sociologies of the right, left, and center carry on a ceaseless polemic battle, which may teach them to limit themselves to the type of social phenomena that best corresponds to each, but is more likely to sharpen the swords of competing ideologies. Independence, on the other hand, is indistinguishable from an attempt to integrate sociological analysis, which in turn presupposes both a principle of unity, in other words of hierarchization. of the various levels of analysis, and also a principle of dissociation, in other words of separation of society as a system of systems from society as a collectivity historically and geographically defined and ruled by a state. So instead of simply separating the problems of the field of historicity, those of the political system, and those of social organization, what must be recognized in the first place is that the first set commands the second, and through them the third. Behind the categories of social practice, behind order, stratification, and power, one must always seek out, in the last analysis, the orientations of the system of historical action and class relations. From the consumption of society one must move back up to the production of society via its adaptation to changes. But this operation has no meaning unless one recognizes that the whole constituted in this way cannot be identified with a territorial and political collectivity directly observable as the field of action of a state. There can and must also exist, as opposed to sociology, a political science that begins from the state, from its power, its role in international relations, that then
308
Chapter Six
the state, from its power, its role in international relations, that then considers social organization, represented as a set of resources hierarchized and distributed by power, before studying political exchanges and finally, as its ultimate remainder, collective feelings and collective conditions of existence. At the moment of embarkation upon a study of social movements, nothing could be more indispensable than to remind ourselves that this topic is entirely the province of sociological analysis proper and must not be confused with other topics such as the functioning of the state, political crises, or even the struggle for "power." c.
Modernizing Protests
To organizational claims, to institutional tensions, and to social movements, we must also add modernizing protests. It is in relation to social change that the notion of modernization needs to be introduced and discussed, but it is also bound to occur inside a societal type too, for. although movements tend to move from present into future in the name of modernization, others are defined by their struggle in the name of the present against the past. Such a protest arises in reality against the absence of historicity. If the dominant class and the dominated class preponderate over the ruling class and the contestatory class, if the maintenance of the past and its reproduction preponderate over commitment to a beyond in society's functioning, then a society is "disoriented." It is weighed down by the dead works of past systems of historical action, while new domains, latent with historicity, are kept outside the field of social action. The dead is strangling the living, which provokes a simultaneously elementary and ambiguous reaction. Elementary because it is a call for a return to what is most fundamental, a protest against decadence, against the loss of historicity. Ambiguous because it is unaffected by class relations and because its opposition to past forms of domination can be conducted just as well by a new ruling class as by a force of opposition. There can come a moment when forms of social and cultural control lose their meaning. The administrative apparatus in France, for example, remains dominated by the state-centered cultural model. The slightest bureaucratic application takes on the air of a plea to the prince; the citizens are kept well away from everything touching the state. Protests against the arrogance of the state are not separable from those denouncing its inefficiency, its incapacity to provide the services of which it has the monopoly. Such protests are liberal, which means they wish to slough off the old forms of authority, but for the benefit of a new power and a new ruling class just as much as for that of the popular class. This type of protest is more frequent in the cultural sphere than the social sphere. Is Europe, western and eastern alike, not entirely made up of culturally archaic societies? The archaism is more visible in eastern Europe,
Social Movements
309
which often has the air of a museum for nineteenth-century forms of expression, relation, and communication. But the archaism is just as great, though often less of a nuisance, in the west. Hence the importance of attacks against the forms of control operating in the private sector: family, church, school. The principal locuses of socialization are the object of attacks that are directed above all at their loss of meaning. I don't think that the condition of women and the discriminations they undergo can be explained by the needs of class domination in our type of society, whether industrial or postindustrial. The dependence of women clearly stems from much further back. But whatever its origin, upon which Serge Moscovici has recently shed a great deal of light (La soci&e contre nature)* the condition of women appears nowadays above all as a vacuum of meaning: our society is incapable of explaining the definition it gives of masculine and feminine roles, or of saying why it resists the control of birth when it accepts the control of disease and hence, to a considerable extent, the control of death. The movement forming against the subjection of women speaks rightly of a struggle for liberation or equality. Is that not the definition of a modernizing action that still remains indeterminate as to its meaning within present society? The success of such a movement, by bringing vast new areas into "public life," by extending the scope of organized control, can be of benefit to the new ruling class, for example by opening up new markets or giving rise to a new "morality" capable of effective use against the subversive elements introduced into the liberating struggle, but can also help in the formation of new popular social movements rising in opposition to this advance of modernized conservative forces. Such protests are important above all at a time when a new type of society is being introduced. The new ruling class is often busier struggling against the past than against its new adversary. It is easier to identify these movements of cultural modernization than those that appeal to historicity against the excessive weight of institutionalization or of organizational problems. Often, in fact, such movements are forced to appeal to a more or less mythical past in order to protest the reduction of society to its functioning. A new right, a new left: these terms refer less to a socially undetermined modernization than to a "fundamentalism" so ambiguous that it can sometimes lead their most ardent representatives into alliances with those apparently furthest away from them. How can one forget in France the role of a nonliberal Catholicism such as that of Bernanos and Mauriac nevertheless engaging in the fight against Spanish fascism? The constant weakness and the frequent greatness of these movements stems from the fact that they are socially very indeterminate. Consequently
310
Chapter Six
those who refuse to see social movements as anything but confrontations of interests, even struggles for the management of the state apparatus, are the first to denounce the "infantilism" and muddle of such manifestations. But they also have an exceptional reverberation, for although they are not social movements animating a conflict, they do at least reach those who are rejecting dead traditions and trying to give a meaning to something that has lost or not yet acquired meaning. B. The Nature of Social Movements a.
Identity, Opposition, and Totality
One is at first tempted to say that a social movement is to be distinguished from other types of collective conduct by the fact that it is oriented toward values, toward a conception of society and man. Whether its content be religious, political, or economic, does it not always appeal to principles: equality, justice, liberty, happiness? Smelser's analysis enables us to avoid this error of judgment. The appeal to values corresponds to a crisis of the value system of social organization and in no way imposes the introduction of the concept of the social movement as I employ it here. On the contrary, the specific characteristic of a social movement is that of not being oriented toward consciously expressed values. Because it is situated on the level of the system of historical action, it is defined by the confrontation of opposing interests over the control of a society's forces of development and field of historical experience. A social movement is not the expression of an intention or of a conception of the world. It is not possible to speak of a social movement if one cannot at the same time define the countermovement to which it is in opposition. The labor movement is not a social movement unless, beyond all protests against the crises of social organization, beyond any pressures for negotiation, it is challenging the domination of the ruling class. It does not matter whether that challenge is reformist or revolutionary, whether or not it is accompanied by confidence in the capacity of the institutional system to deal with the conflict. What is important is that the actor should no longer define himself in relation to functional norms or procedures of discussion and decision, but in relation to a general social conflict. This conflict does not consist of direct opposition between concrete social groups; it is challenging the control of social development as that development is defined by a cultural model and by the other elements of the system of historical action. The conflict has a stake, occurs within a field. The adversaries always speak the same language; otherwise there could be no debate and no combat.
Social Movements
311
In a society defined by the role of scientific and technological innovation, by organizations managing change, by a social hierarchy based upon knowledge, and by the pursuit of privatization in the realm of consumption, no social movement can exist oriented toward another type of historicity. Similarly, in the nineteenth century, the liberal movement representing the capitalists and the labor movement were in no sense opposing two entirely different types of society. They were opposing two conflicting versions of progress. People often talk today about the hostility of youth—and particularly of the student movement—to the consumer society. Nothing could be more false. The conflict is between the world of objects and the world of enjoyment, of expression and imagination, between two opposing versions of consumption. Both technocrats and members of the contestatory movement speak in equal measure about creativity, about change, about the central role of knowledge; but each considers that the adversary is appropriating and destroying the fundamental orientations of the system of historical action. This is why 1 define a social movement as the combination of a principle of identity, a principle of opposition, and a principle of totality, and also, seen in a broader context, as an actor in a field of historical action. 1. The principle of identity is the definition the actor gives of himself. A social movement cannot be organized unless this definition is conscious; but the formation of the movement largely precedes that consciousness. It is conflict that constitutes and organizes the actor. It is usual for the actor to define himself in the first place in organizational and institutional terms. It is easier to speak of the poor—in other words of a socioeconomic status—or of the underprivileged—in other words those without access to the institutional and political system, who are not represented—than of the working class. It is the practice of social relations that situates and defines the historical actor, that is the social movement, just as it is the field of decision that defines the political actor. The actor of the social movement is therefore never given in any direct observation. The working class does not simply consist of all workers added up to make a whole. Nor does it consist of workers as they are placed beneath the domination of the capitalists, for that definition would also do for the identification of a political or organizational actor. The working class is the actor of a social movement solely because it is aiming, through its conflict with the capitalist class, at control of the industrial system of historical action. Consciousness of identity is part of the definition of a class or of a class social force, for the classes cannot be defined other than in terms of social relations, and therefore of the orientations of each of the social adversaries. In the practice of social interactions, the principle of identity presents itself as a transcendence of the group or category that is its bearer. The workers in
312
Chapter Six
a factory, a workshop, or a town, view themselves, in certain circumstances, as engaged in a struggle that overflows the framework in which it appears, that mobilizes demands that cannot be entirely satisfied within an organizational or political framework. They have an awareness of being more than themselves, both because they are in conflict with an adversary drawing on more than his own forces and because they have objectives that are not just theirs. Observers of strikes often distinguish between instrumental strikes, defined by their precise aims, and expressive strikes, through which the group asserts or constructs its solidarity. It is self-expression that causes the principle of identity to appear. I employ this term not in order to create the impression that a social movement begins in the first place from a consciousness of itself, of its interests and its aims, before entering into a struggle with the adversary on a battlefield determined by circumstances. The identity of the actor cannot be defined independently of the real conflict with the adversary and of recognition of the stake of the struggle. 2. The principle of opposition must be defined in the same way. A movement cannot be organized without being able to name its adversary, but its action does not presuppose that identification. The conflict causes the adversary to appear, as it shapes the consciousness of the actors confronting one another. Even if the conflict is limited by its immediate stake and the forces it brings into play, one cannot speak of principles of opposition unless the actor feels himself confronted by a general social force in a combat that is challenging the general orientations of social life. The dimension of the conflict is fundamental in any social movement. This conflict may be worked out partly on the institutional level, but never completely. Appeal may be made to an arbiter, a mediator, a tribunal, a court. But this is always a tactic, justified by the resolve to make use of legal means as well as force in order to defend oneself against the adversary or attack him, and does not spring from the conviction that a change in the distribution of influence can make the cause of the conflict disappear. Whatever its particular locus of occurrence, therefore, this conflict is always experienced by the social movement as a class conflict—which does not mean that every social movement is struggling for economic interests. If such interests are in fact involved, a social movement only exists when the conflict is placed on the level of the cultural model central to the society in question. In any type of society—agrarian, mercantile, industrial or postindustrial— only one pair of social movements exists, that which sets the social classes involved in opposition. But concrete social movements are not always ' 'total," especially in periods when a societal type is being formed or is in decline.
Social Movements
313
The agent of the social movement may thus not be directly definable in class terms. The recent student movements, I am convinced, revealed the social conflicts of a postindustrial society, but no one defends the idea that students are a social class. A movement of townspeople, of consumers, a regional or cultural movement can all be manifestations of a social movement. But their agents are not class actors, insofar as the social movement is intermixed with organizational claims, political pressures, or a modernizing protest. 3. Finally, no social movement can exist that defines itself solely by conflict. All possess what I term a principle of totality. The labor movement only existed because it did not consider industrialization solely as an instrument of capitalist profit but had the will to construct a noncapitalist, an anticapitalist, industrial society, freed from private ownership of the means of production and capable of a higher development. The principle of totality is nothing but the system of historical action of which the adversaries, situated within the double dialectic of the social classes, are disputing the domination. The social movement is therefore not necessarily all-embracing. The conflict may be engaged over a single one of the elements of the SHA. It has a different character according to whether its locus is order, movement, orientations, or resources, the social or the cultural. But even if it is localized, the social movement is still expressing a principle of totality. And this is demonstrated by its efforts to gain control of and orient the social agencies whose function it is to watch over one of the elements of the SHA. The most important social movements are also, however, the most allinclusive, and it is difficult to see how a movement could remain circumscribed in any lasting way by one of the elements of historicity, since it would then be in danger of becoming fused with analyzable collective conduct on the institutional or the organizational level. Important social movements challenge the general orientation of the system of historical action, which is to say the action of their adversary in its totality. It constantly happens that there are "ultras" who deny any principle of totality. This behavior corresponds to phases of rupture, when a social movement still in formation clashes, not with an adversary, but with the adversary's identification with social development. Then the worker smashes the machines and sabotages production, the student rejects all teaching. If one isolates such behavior, it can be explained without any recourse to the concept of the social movement. The university or industrial crisis can be pushed into non-meaning. The worker or the student reduced to real or virtual unemployment can reject "society." But they belong to social movements insofar as they are merely extreme expressions of them, in very particular situations. Social movements themselves struggle
314
Chapter Six
against tendencies that destroy them by reducing them to the expression of a crisis of social organization. To destroy the industry or the university is also to destroy the social movement forming within it. Sabotage or criminal actions are undifferentiated forms of opposition conduct; they can therefore be analyzed at the most elementary level, that of the crisis of social organization. A social movement cannot be analyzed outside the Field of historicity in which it forms. One may say in general that it brings into opposition classes, or social forces that are in the last analysis class forces, whose struggle is for control of a system of historical action. But it is the knowledge of this latter that makes it possible to define the nature of the class actor, the field of the conflict, and its stake. Hence the danger of anachronism: in looking back into the preindustrial past for the equivalent of the labor movement one may fail to recognize the social movements characteristic of preindustrial societies, whose actors, stakes, and forms of action are all different from those of the labor movement. In the same way, reference to the labor movement may prevent a comprehension of the social movements forming in postindustrial societies, which are challenging the consumer society in the name of the most diverse forms of cultural self-management. Are these once again just Utopias or resistances to change? Certainly not, for the new system of historical action imposes a new definition of social movements' principle of totality. The labor movement itself cannot be reduced to a conflict of economic interests or to a reaction against proletarianization. It is animated by an image of industrial "civilization/* by the idea of a progress achieved through forces of production used for the good of all—a very different thing from the ordinary egalitarian Utopia, which is fairly unconcerned with conditions of growth. Must we conclude from this that a social movement necessarily proposes a "counterplan," an alternative model of society? Not at all. Such a statement in effect confuses two levels of analysis, for a plan or a model of decision cannot be defined except on the level of the institutional system, or even that of social organization. One does not speak of a counterplan unless one is aiming at some sort of negotiation or political pressure, unless one believes that there is a possibility of modifying society's management by opening up a political discussion, by institutionalizing the societal debate. This corresponds to the situation of some social movements, but not of all. A social movement can be reformist, reformist-revolutionary, or revolutionary. Which it is depends upon the relations established between the problems of social organization, of the institutional system, and class relations. But these differences cannot affect the definition of what a social movement is. The essential thing is to recognize that a social movement is not the expression of a contradiction; it causes a conflict to explode. It is a form of
Social Movements
315
collective conduct oriented, not toward the values of the social organization or toward participation in a system of decision, but toward the stake of the class conflicts that are the system of historical action. In order to recognize a social movement it is not enough to ask the actor three questions: for whom are you acting? against whom are you acting? what result do you expect from your action? Any actor, in any situation, can answer those questions. No social movement exists unless the system of historical action, including each of its elements, is the object of opposing visions held by class actors who are antagonists. The relation of the popular class to T (totality) passes through its contestation of the domination exerted by the upper class. / (identity), O (opposition), and T cannot be given as components that could be isolated by the actor himself: the principle of identity is the instrument of separation between O and 7\ which present themselves as linked by the fact of the upper class's dominion over historicity. O cannot be apprehended other than as a filter along the link between / and 7; the principle of totality, the stake, only appears as such through a misunderstanding of the conflict between actor and adversary, otherwise it would be no more than an objective, which is to say either the projection of/ or else, on the contrary, simply a meeting ground, neutral as a football field. It is the specific characteristic of a social movement that each of its elements refers on to the relations between the two others. Consequently it is never in a state of affective neutrality or pure analysis of its situation. It is never at rest; it is ceaselessly sent on from one of its components to another, from one of its slopes to the other. Its consciousness cannot have any other content than that of endless movement, of unquiet, and of the passion that sets it in the most total opposition to the actor in an organization who is defined by his place within a whole and receives his identity from the social system. The actors of a movement do not form a social milieu that one can define by common choices, a personal and collective social identity. On the contrary, a social movement is constantly occupied with challenging the social definition of roles, the functioning of the political arena, and the social order. Its unity can never be that of an organization, for it is what unites hope and rejection, negation and affirmation. It is at the level of the system of historical action that the social movement is situated. It is false to make a distinction between the social movement as an elementary, limited protest, imprisoned within the lower ranks of society, and a political action that will give it a broader scope and enable it to challenge the domination of class and state. A social movement cannot be reduced to economics and pay claims. The workers' labor situation gives them a class consciousness that may be disarticulated, overlaid, diluted, but never reducible to immediate demands or dissatisfaction. We shall look at the
316
Chapter Six
inadequacies of a "spontaneist" representation later on; it is much more important to reject the notion according to which class consciousness can only be brought in from outside. We must not confuse consciousness with action, society with the state. Such confusions lead to the identification of a social movement with its organization or its leaders. This danger, the most serious threatening the practice of social movements, must also be combated at the level of analysis. The origin of Stalinism lies in the total hostility displayed toward the Proudhonians and the populists, and in the confidence put in the party as bearer of scientific truth. It was in this way that the labor movement engendered its opposite, a totalitarian state. The labor movement is defined first of all by worker consciousness, which is to say consciousness of the conflict between capitalists and wage earners for the orientation of industrial society. And 1 do mean consciousness. If it is necessary not to reduce that consciousness to opinion, it is more important still not to dissociate action from consciousness. If the soldier at Waterloo cannot perceive what is at stake in the battle, that is because what is involved is an event and a struggle that is more intersocial than social. But the colonized native who rebels, or the militant worker—even though he may come forward only to demand more bread, or because he is reacting to an insult—has a representation of the conflict in which he is engaged and a project of society. These historical actors, combatants in social movements, have a double will toward creation and control or, what comes to the same thing, a Utopia and an ideology. They want to manage their own society and to combat the adversary who is preventing them from doing so. Taking the viewpoint of the established order, one can study forms of social conduct "from the outside/* as responses to a crisis of the organization, without asking any questions about the consciousness of the actors. If, on the other hand, one seeks out, behind what gives itself out as order, both the orientations of a system of historical action and class conflicts, if one reveals the social relations lying behind roles and statuses, then it is impossible not to find social and cultural orientations in the actors of the field of historicity. But this consciousness is not the discourse of the actor; it is inseparable from the action carried out within social relations and for a historical stake. This is why it transcends individual opinions and manifests itself in a collective consciousness that provides itself with ideological and Utopian expressions, whose existence one recognizes from the great energy they channel into the mobilization of a certain type of collective action. This is not to say that man wishes by his nature to create and control the product of his creation, for such an assertion is as empty of meaning as all those that seek to define a human nature. But it is an assertion that the
Social Movements
317
conduct linked to class relations and to participation in the system of historical action cannot be understood other than as oriented, as having a meaning for the actor himself, insofar as he is acting at that level of social reality. The actor is not a puppet controlled by a social structure, any more than that structure is the result of the actor's intentions. Structure and action cannot be dissociated, for it is in terms of social relations that both must be expressed. This general idea fits in well with analysis of the social movement in itself: class relations and social movements are not dissociable. But we must not apply it too brutally to the study of real conduct. A social movement is never "pure." On the one hand it is intermingled with organizational and institutional conduct; on the other, it is also an organization and sometimes almost a state within the state. Membership of a class movement is not entirely described by class consciousness. When one considers a complex and organized protest movement, one becomes aware of a discrepancy between consciousness and action; usually the observer will find that the movement is made up of leaders on the one hand—who manage its organization, define its strategy and tactics, while also sharing in its orientations—and a "base" made up of members much more directly subject to organizational constraints who want to obtain limited advantages, such as an increase in their wages, a food allowance, or the rescinding of some sanction, who are also seeking to increase their influence, to hold discussions with representatives of authority, and who fall prey to all the problems that arise from their own heterogeneity as a group and that create tensions or conflicts within it. There is a great temptation at this point to renounce any analysis at all in terms of the social movement, which suddenly seems "idealist," and simply to analyze the policy of the leaders and the discontent of the "base." It is not enough simply to resist that temptation. One must show that the hypothesis of social movement is indispensable to a comprehension of the link between these two faces of protest. And first one must listen in very hard to that "base," which can never be reduced to its pragmatic, immediate objectives, which is the bearer of consciousness of social conflict and its stake, but a consciousness intermingled with attitudes that evoke other aspects of each individual's social situation. It is the action of the leaders that isolates this consciousness and draws it up from where it lies embedded, and often fragmented, in the midst of other elements. But it is this consciousness that makes it possible to separate what is strategy in the action of the leaders from what is social movement. And this also defines the importance of militants. Not that they are the pure expression of the social movement, liberated both from the confusion of the "inorganic masses" and from the excessively strategic objectives of the leaders; but they are indeed the mediators between consciousness and action, sometimes nearer to the base, sometimes already
Chapter Six
318
leaders, but almost always subject to acute tensions and thereby driven on toward a sociological analysis of the problems of the social movement. b.
The Field of Historical Action
A social movement cannot constitute an autonomous unit of analysis. No party, or union, or voluntary association of whatever kind can ever be identified with a social movement, since they can all just as easily be manifesting reactions to an organizational crisis or to tensions in the institutional system. The social movement is identifiable only as an element of a field of historical action, which is to say of the interactions between the collective actor under consideration, his adversary, and the relatively autonomous expressions of the system of historical action, particularly the cultural model. The labor movement is not only definition of itself, of the employers, and of the stake of class relations; it is also a response to employer action, to employer social movement, the aim of which does not necessarily correspond term for term to that of the labor movement. The relation between the two social movements can take the most diverse forms; but all of them are more or less directly connected with one of the following three cases presented in figure 34. In the first case, the two social movements do correspond term for term. The capitalist and the proletarian are defining themselves and defining their adversary in the same way, while at the same time situating their conflict in the same field. 1
2
3
Of