GENERAL THEORY AND RESEARCH
toral relativity. This response was especially strong among anthropologists, fcut also appeared among sociologists. The Hobhouse-Ginsberg type of evolutionary thinking was one of the most widely attacked and, in large measure, I tended to "go along with" the attack. Nevertheless, I was never convinced that the anti-evolutionists had in any way seriously damaged the evolutionary components of Weber's historical-sociological analyses, nor those of Durkheim as I came to appreciate their nature better.1
Seen in the framework of the sociology of knowledge, it is clear that ' the anti-evolutionist wave was a partial manifestation of the social sciences' oneed to assert their independence from the biological. The original an-/thropological meaning of the word "culture" was thus that class of determinants and/or products of human action which were not "reducible" to terms of biological heredity. By and large, however, this "independence" movement in the social sciences has now long since succeeded, making it possible to acknowledge kinship-a little like the rebellious adolescent who, after having established his independence, can again acknowledge some genuine kinship with his parents in more than a biological sense.
It was in that frame of mind that I found myself, a number of years later, more and more positively concerned with evolutionary ideas. This interest led me back to biological reference points and to an attempt to "'understand some of the newer developments in biological science. Out of 'this I emerged strongly convinced about the basic continuity of the evolutionary development of all classes of living systems, including a continuity between the organic level and the socio-cultural.2
One particularly important point regarding the biological and socio-cultural levels may be noted immediately, though others will be developed as we go along. This is the "analogy" or functional similarity between the role of the genetic constitution in the organic world and that of the cultural system in the world of human action systems, an insight I owe especially to the biologist Alfred Emerson, who spoke of the parallel between "gene* and "symbol." This idea linked up in a special way with the "four-function paradigm" with which I have worked since 1953, Among the four func-j tiooal categories, namely, those of adaptation, system goal-attainment, in-jtegration, and pattern maintenance, the last occupied a special place ai 'relatively invariant, i.e., changing by something like "evolutionary" processes on a long-time scale, rather than by short-run "adfustive" processes. During about the same period it also became dear that the fourfold
1. Robert Bellah. "DuAheim and History," American SncioloRical Rpview.

paradigm could be used at the "general action" level as distinguished from that of the social system, with which I had worked most intensively. At this level the four "primary subsystems of action" were clearly the "behavioral organism," the psychological or personality system, tlie social system, and the cultural system. The special position of tlic pattern-maintenance system was the primary key to another major insight, namely. that the fourfold scheme fitted the economic classification of die factors of production and the shares of income, and that within that "land" clearly belonged in the pattern-maintenance position.8
Soon after that I became aware of certain developments outside my own field wliich went far to give a deeper theoretical rationale to Emerson's "equation" between the gene and the symbol. One of these was the development of linguistics in ways which connected it with cybernetic and information theory, treating language as organized about "symbolic codes," and the emergence in the new "microgenetics" of essentially the same conception, most dramatically set forth in the discovery of the chemical structure of DNA and the subsequent development of the conception of the "genetic code," 4 One might say, if language, the status of which as a central aspect of culture was scarcely in doubt, and the biochemistry of the genetic process were organized in terms of "codes" the main structure of which was resistant to short-run change, why should not the aspects of culture with which sociologists had been more concerned fit broadly into the same conception?
SOME RELEVANT SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
I do not mean to suggest that all of this perspective was borrowed from models of biological theory. There has been, over the years, on my own part and based on an impressive growth of the social science literature, a considerable accumulation of knowledge and insight at social science levels, the digesting and organizing of which, for me, revolved above all about two foci. One was my continuing concern with Max Weber's pattern of comparative and historical analysis of societies and their cultural traditions. The Other was the "pattern-variable" scheme, which had "fathered" tlie four-function paradigm of which I have spoken. Perhaps this is sufficiently familiar to most readers so it is not necessary to outline it here, especially "s It was used as the main organizing conceptual framework of my book, Ue Socfff; System (1951).

GENERAL THEORY AND RESEARCH

Another very important leading conception does, however, link directly with biology, namely that of differentiation. This conception and its oomplement, that of integration, have of course figured very prominently in social &s well as biological science-perhaps most notably in Herbert Spencer. Among its various aspects, it seems appropriate first to emphasize that differentiation is a directional process, it has a starting point, namely an "un" or "less" differentiated state of a system and, at a later time, a differentiated or a more differentiated state.
An important point about differentiation as a process is that in living systems it follows, very generally indeed, the binary principle. What begun as one unit or subsystem divides into two. Perhaps the best known case in the organic world is the process of cell division. If there is at least a presumption in favor of the binary principle, this fact introduces among Other tilings a very welcome element of both simplification and symmetry. It has been particularly congenial to me through its connection with the logic of certain aspects of the theoretical scheme with which I have worked, such as the dichotomous character of pattern-variable pairs and the conception of four primary system functions. Furthermore, in tracing developmental processes this presumption may be a very useful guide in any attempt to identify stages.
lie concept of differentiation is a basic unifier of the evolutionary and the comparative perspectives. A process of differentiation proceeds in a temporal sequence of "from-to." In the process it brings about differences among parts of the system which did not previously exist. Furthermore, since these differences are conceived to have emerged by a process of change in a system, which I interpret to mean in some sense within the "framework of the system," the presumption is that the differentiated parts are comparable in the sense of being systematically related to each other, both because they still belong within the same system and, through their interrelations, to their antecedents."
The term "systematically related" as used above of course needs to be defined. Here my assumption is that function is the master concept for analysis of the organization of living systems.6 As such it is superordinate to both "structure" and "process." That structures and processes should be differentiated along functional lines within the same system implies their comparability. If they were in principle incomparable, first the nature of

the system could not be rationally understood and, second, it would not be possible to account for its integration as a system. Integration is an essential concept for living systems, even though in another sense and at another level a parallelogram of forces may be treated as a system without any assumption of integration, at least as the concept of integration is being used here.
This approach poses the question of comparability in a somewhat unusual way. The more usual way is to seek out "similars" which resemble each other in that they can be subsumed under the same logical "class" but are also significantly variant. From this starting point one could proceed to the building up of a "taxonomic" scheme in terms of the definition of more general classes, and various orders of subclasses, without reference to the question of whether the instances are or are not included in the same system,
If we are to take the "system" approach, rather than that of "similarity and difference," two dimensions become relevant to comparative shidies which are not found at the taxonomic level. These are the nature and implications of the belongingness of compared items within the same system and, second, the genetic dimension of relatedness, namely, with respect to differentiation in what respects from what common origin. In this connection it is also essential to recognize the importance of the pluralism of (ystems. In the organic world the individual organism looms particularly large especially at the higher evolutionary levels. But tlie main genetic heritage is "carried" at another level, namely, that of the species, which is the primary system of reference for the subscience of genetics and for evolutionary theory. There is a variety of other system references at the organic level, such as that of "ecosystems."
At the human level, organism and personality are especially intimately linked system levels. An older generation of anthropologists tended to set both of these, more especially personality, over against "culture," as the other crucial reference, which is in some ways comparable to the species. Here, however, in a rather special way a fourth system reference, the social, te.. the system constituted by the interaction of a plurality of organism-personality units within a cultural framework, becomes very central. This if true in a way which does not probably apply directly to subhuman species, even to the famous "social insects." The salient difference, of course, lies in the mediation of human social interaction by cultural level communication, which is unique to the human world, even though it has some antecedents. At first glance the approach to comnaraliili'fv thrniin4> /v"^�/<" "o-*-

plete with its German "historistic" antecedents, and maintain that meaning-rumess of characterization of a structural unit or process could be defined only within one very specific system. If human "history" consisted of a population of essentially unique "cultures," as has been alleged, this con-ridemtion would indeed virtually eliminate the relevance of "comparative method." But empirically, this simply is not the case; history consists rather, -MCB the system of organic species, of an immensely rammed "inverted branching tree" of forms at many levels of system reference.
What ties the "branches," forms, and levels together into a macro-gystem, is in the first instance common genetic origin. This is to say that differences among subsystems have, by and large, arisen through processes of differentiation from what in some sense have been "more primitive'* forms. The human socio-cultural universe is by no means so variegated as, at least superficially considered, the organic seems to be, but it is by no means narrowly constricted.
SOCIO-CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT FROM A SINGLE ORIGIN
A particularly important point here concerns a dual thesis. The first is that Ac organic development of man as species must have been essentially coincident with that of what we know as society and culture. The second is that the evidence seems to point to a single evolutionary origin of man. If Ads dual thesis is correct, the problem of comparability can in principle be held within the framework of differentiation and continuing inclusion within the same system. Furthermore, differences can be referred back to those emerging through processes of differentiation from a common origin.
If these two propositions are correct, then Durkheim's search, in forming the plan for his last maJor work, for the "most primitive" type of society and its religion, was sensible. However difficult it is to define and to find specific empirical evidence of such primitiveness, and however unsatisfactory Durkheim's attempt may appear in the light of both empirical and theoretical evidence which has become available in the sixty years since he wrote, this proposition concerning the importance of primitiveness remains valid. Moreover two major things can be said about such a primitive "society." At the action system level it must be the least differentiated which can be found. Secondly it must comprise all of the essential components of a scoring system of action, not in "rudimentary" form but in an important sense as "fully evolved." That the organic basis capable of "carrying" a cultural system must be nresent. eo^s without saving. We know somftliinff.

Comparative Studies and Evolutionary Change
with" the physical environment especially through hands and arms, and to form trans-organism solidarities, the latter emerging in the first instance, I suggest, through the potentialities of the erotic component of motivation.
"Culture" must be involved, first of all, through language as a genuinely symbolic medium of communication and expression, and also through what Durkheim, in a deliberately undifferentiated sense, called "religion." This latter must include a system of "constitutive symbols," which Durkheim, perhaps in an overly rationalistic way, called "beliefs," and a set of "practices" which above all are "symbolically significant" acts. These latter are generally called "rituals" and are performed for the most part by groups in organized social settings. Religion serves above all, at this level, to give cultural "meaning," both to the "society" and its principal substructures, teen collectively, and to the individual personality and organism as they bear on acting in social relations and in the context of cultural symbol-ization.
If religion is the primary cultural "glue" which integrates such an action system, it is kinship-a set of relations of social solidarity organized obout the two foci of "blood"- which integrates action at the social system level. That these two foci of kinship organization are related to each other in complex ways is attested by the fact, which should be theoretically derivable, of the universal existance of an "incest taboo," i.e., the limitation of texual unions, especially those legitimized by prospective parenthood, to certain subgroups of the membership of the society. These relations are defined both positively and negatively, i.e., by rules of endogamy and of exogamy.
Finally, society, personality, and organism are related, in ways always also involving culture, by two complexes concerned with human relations to the physical environment. The first of these is primarily economic, concerning man's relation to the environment as the location of resources necessary to meet his needs for food, shelter, clothing, and the like; The other is the organization of social relations with respect to the territorial location of behavior, which concerns place of "residence" but also concerns the territory within which groups may carry out their activities. This territorial focus may also regulate the involvements between society's members and nonmembers. The functional complex referred to as territoriality includes control of the use of physical force. In this and other respects it can be thought of mainly as a "political" complex.
I may now consider the question of what may reasonably be meant by the concept "undifferentiated" in this context. It clearly must be defined

notoriously complex. Similar things can be said about primitive languages, and (he length at which Durkheim found it necessary to discuss Australian totemism could certainly suffice as the basis for an adequate analytical, treatise on a major branch of Christianity, which is certainly a more highly differentiated religion.
One major point is that differentiation is not only internal complicated-ness, but differentiation from. The word "from" then must be defined as :'meamng differentiated from other components of what is treated as the same system. Thus even though Australian kinship is highly complex, it is not highly differentiated from structural components with primarily economic, political, religious, and other functions. This is very unlike kinship in modem societies which in one sense is much "simpler" but in another is much more highly differentiated from other structures with different functions. In a society like the Australian the whole society is a single nexus of kinship relations which then constitutes a structure which, in the nature of (he case, is to a high degree "functionally diffuse."
If function is, as I suggested above, the master-concept for the analysis of living systems, then the criterion of high vs. low levels of differ-entiatedness must be differentiation with respect to kinds of functional im-- portance or "contribution" to the functioning of the specific system, or class of systems, of reference. By this criterion, kinship, reh'gion, economic, and political organization are far more highly differentiated from each other in modern than in any less "evolved" type of society.
MODES OF SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION

Two problems open out from here. One concerns the axes on which differentiation may be expected to occur or, conversely, can retrospectively be interpreted. If we work with a very simple basic scheme, in this case one;
involving only four functions, then the cases that are too complex to fit ;| directly into such a scheme must be dealt with in terms of plural system-references, which is in the nature of the case a difficult enterprise. The second problem concerns the delineation of some scheme of evolutionary stages in the realm of human action systems.
With respect to the first problem, a "landmark" insight occurred which was nearly contemporaneous with the emergence of the four-function paradigm and had much to do with it, namely that of the highly generalized significance of the lines of differentiation of the nuclear family on the axes of generation and sex roles. The nuclear family is, of course, a social group-ine which is in a special sense "biologically based" and hence mav have

the organic and the action level of living systems. It became evident that these two axes of generation and sex were, on a general theoretical level, essentially the same as those which Bales and his associates had found in the experimental study of small groups, whose members were essentially uniform by sex and age. and were without the "diffuse enduring solidarity" which ideally characterizes families. These two axes constitute what is, in some sense, an hierarchical status-difference: in the familial case as between the parental and the filial generations, and in the case of the experimental groups, a leadership-followership differentiation. The other axis is that of a differentiation between qualitative "types" of function in the system:
in the family case, the sex-role; in that of the experimental groups, the distinction formulated as that between primarily "instrumental" and primarily "expressive" functions.
The first or generational axis, which I would postulate as not characteristic of the most primitive societies, is that on which systems of stratification are built. As I have noted in Societies7 stratification entails the rupture of the "seamless" nexus of kinship relations, so that the emerging "classes" become exogamous to each other. At both ends, however, the principal kin-ihip units, notably lineages, remain to a high degree functionally diffuse, not only with respect to the "personality-focused" functions of the modem family, but economic, political, and religious functions as well.
However this rupture of the kinship nexus cannot occur without segmentation of the former society into at least two, unless there is a basis of lolidarity which is not fused with kinship ties and which crosses the class line. It would, I think, be very generally agreed that such solidarity in the early stages is political and religious. It very generally involves the emergence of "centers" in Shils* sense8 and frequently the kind of chieftainship which merges into monarchy. Military functions, oriented both toward 'o effectiveness in relation to other societies and toward maintaining order and > control within the population and area of the society, are likely to be prom- / inent, just as they are in more complex societies. However, religion, with / the development of genuine cults and with them more or less definitely tpcdalized priesthoods, tends also to be very prominent. Any very con-riderable differentiation of economic institutions tends to come later.
The analytical interpretation of these generally accepted facts raises .certain questions. Clearly the second, "horizontal" or "instrumental-

expressive," axis is involved. In spite of there being stratification, centralization, and an "elite," there is a pronounced tendency at the very top for the political and religious components to be combined, most strikingly in the institutions of a "God-King," even though lower down political funetion-ariea, fike the military and civil "administrators," will be differentiated from predominantly religious personnel, usually called "priesthoods." The prin-dfde <rf the heredity of status through kinship, however, remains very otroog for both political and religious groups. Such social mobility as there is Operates either through such mechanisms as favoritism-e.g., "adoption" into kinship status, and merging into �patrimonialism"-or through the consequences of political overturns, conquests, and coups.
It seems most reasonable to treat this massive set of phenomena, within the simple four-function paradigm, as the differentiation of the system along one "diagonal," namely that of pattern-maintenance and goal-attainmeot as distinguished from adaptation and integration. The functional reasons for this asymmetry seem to concern the strains incident to the combination of major new steps toward collective effectiveness-in the "political" context-and at the same time from the problem of maintaining the hod of solidarity which would at least contain centripetal tendencies, especially as between elite and "common people." Here Weber's very fundamental analysis of the legitimation of political authority is central. This legitimation must at some level be conceived and institutionalized in re-Hgiom terms.
It will be evident to many readers that this is the axis which Durkheim classically formulated as that of "mechanical solidarity." He did not, however. I think, sufficiently emphasize its connection, at least in early societal evolution, with the emergence of stratification and the simultaneous functional imperative of promoting collective effectiveness and legitimizing the agendes of that effectiveness in ways which asserted solidarity across the lines of stratification.
The suggestion then is that stable differentiation on the more or less "pure" instrumental-expressive axis depends on some kind of prior "solution" of Ac problem of legitimizing politically oriented stratification and its relation to a cultural base. Here a fundamental point concerns the differentiation of the legitimation of inequalities from that of qualitative functional contributions. There are innumerable concrete contexts in which this problem has arisen, but one which has been perennial right down to the present is that of the roles of the sexes, wliich, as I suggested, seems to be in some sense "prototvrn'cal" of this

a superiority-inferiority relationship. In an important sense a new phase of strain over this problem has very recently arisen in modem societies.
Durkheim again suggested a line of analysis which seems to be of central importance here. This is, if I may interpret freely, the development of "organic solidarity" as the essential condition of institutionalizing the combination of instrumental-expressive differentiation and equality of status. Put in analytical terms, this means that the egalitarian component must be not only a "value" pattern, but that it must also be rather firmly institutionalized in the integrative sector of the social system if it is to be capable of resisting the pressures toward inequality that stem both from the urges toward collective political effectiveness and from the recognition of competent achievement. This institutionalization must be reinforced by autonomous control of adequate economic resources.
Only in the broadest sense can an ultra-simple fourfold scheme like that with which I have been working deal with such problems as the delineation of the main structural outline of the earlier phases of socio-cultural evolution. Even if the exceedingly schematic pattern fust outlined is in any Knse acceptable, there are immense complications and difficulties in deal-Rig with the details of internal structuring of particular societies and the ranges of variation among them, even at what, by analytical judgment, may teem to be "about the same level of differentiation."
SYSTEMS OF SOCIETIES
Perhaps, in view of the limitations of this discussion. I may be permitted to bypass these many complications and "cut through" to a con-rideration which I think has by and large not received sufficient attention among comparative sociologists. For understandable reasons we have tended to assume the system-reference of a "society" to be the relevant one, 1x1 to speak of differentiation, integration, and the other functions in this context. The concept of a society, is by no means a simple and obvious one, and I have found myself forced to attempt to clarify and refine it considerably.1 One of the important outcomes of these attempts has been the emer-ynce of the conception of a system of societies, precisely as a social system, with all its cultural, psychological, and environmental concomitants.
Perhaps the most obviously tangible criterion of a society here is that ft If a relatively autonomous territorially organized unit, the members of which on the whole display a relative solidarity and sense of identity-i.e., oorotitute a "societal community "-though of course this solidarity need not

incompatible with, not only interdependence of various sorts with other societies, but also systematic differentiatedness relative to certain of the societies with which the one of reference stands in relations of interdependence. Here a highly important consideration is that there should be evidence that the system of societies had. in the course of its history, undergone a process of differentiation, the main steps of which can be traced. Of course other processes of change are also implied, some of which will be discussed presently.
At the present writing I have in press a small book-the sequel to the -.one entitled Societies: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives-with the title The System of Modem Societies.10 The use of the plural form of : the word "society" in the title is quite deliberate and centrally important. We can of course meaningfully speak of "modem society" as a type, but I do not think it would be useful for sociologists to speak of the Soviet Union, Britain, France, the Scandinavian countries, and the United States-to name a few of the most important-as constituting one society. But if they are many, it does not follow that their differences from each other follow a pattern of random variation, explained in each case by unique "histories."
The broad pattern of analysis which I have followed for modem societies first crystallized for me in reading Marc Bloch's Feudal Society, particularly his characterization of differences in the extent and character-, istics of "feudalism" in the high Middle Ages among Italy, France, England, ?- and Germany. The variations he outlined seemed deBnitely to fit into a four-function pattern.11
When, however, from these clearly "premodem" background considerations, I came to try to characterize the first main emergence of the modem system, this type of functional classification became even more important as a framework for systematization. It became clear that the first ""truly modem" phase should not be placed, as so many have, in the late 18th century signalized by the industrial revolution, but in the 17th. It was also dear that, with respect to the centrally important institutional developments like the legal system, governmental organization, parliamentarism, religion, secular culture, and economic innovation, there was clearly a lead sector" of the European system in that period, namely, the "Northwest Comer" including England, Holland, and France, even though Franco was quite different in certain respects from the other two.
The same period saw the emergence of Prussia as a major political unit

on the Northeastern Comer of the system, as well as a good deal of political and military ferment involving above all Poland and Sweden. Then the "Southern tier," comprising the two "great powers" of Austria and Spain, united for a time under the House of Hapsburg, and a changing post-Renaissance Italy, all on the background of the Counter-Reformation, could be regarded as constituting the more ascriptive, pattern-maintenance and integrative base of the system. For special reasons, which I cannot enter into here, I assigned the goal-attaining role to the Northwest comer, the adaptive role, to the Northeast.12
At a much later phase, that of the present century, the same paradigm seemed to be usable again, but in terms of an expanded and northward-moving central system. The 'lead sector," I have contended, had become North America, especially of course the United States, and the Northeast frontier role had come to be played by the Soviet Union, while the center of gravity of the pattern-maintenance base had moved clearly to continental Europe north of the Alps, including I thought both France and Germany, with England and the smaller northern countries assuming primarily the Integrative role.
There is a further very essential aspect of this paradigm of a modem system of societies. This is the insight-I think it is more than a "contention"
-that the modem type of society has had a single evolutionary origin. This fa a crucial fact parallel to that of the unitary origin of the human species, and with that, of human culture, society, and personality. The older social evolutionists in one sense held this view, but they were not at all clear
obout the line between modem and premodem. My own appreciation of it came above all from Max Weber, most succinctly stated in his Introduction to the general series on the Sociology of Religion, the first volume of which he himself prepared for press in the last year of his life,18
What I have Just said about 17th-century Western society implies that by that time the system was already differentiated to the point of involving at least four distinguishable types of society, with perhaps certain further complications such as the status at about that time of the "city-state belt" lather closely following the Rhine river, and the still somewhat peripheral Northern sector.
As part, then, of the task of comparative systematization, these primary wietal types acquire, in their differentiatedness from each other and from

their place in the system, a certain level of sociological meaningfulness. this, however, can be considerably reinforced by following the problem of comparability and comparison back in the developmental sequences. In the same third chapter of the forthcoming small book I have attempted to outline what seem to be the most important considerations. My reference to Bloch makes clear that I think a major structural differentiation of what at least were partially subsocieties had already begun by the high Middle Ages. They existed, however, still within the framework of a formally common religious culture, namely Roman Catholic Christianity, and one which at the political level had not yet dearly Broken up into "national states," even though the Holy Roman Empire was very loosely organized. The fact that England and France were at best only equivocally incorporated into the Empire was of course one of the starting points for their lead position at the decisive period.
The Reformation period clearly involved the breaking up of what was tiw previous Mediaeval unity, both through the split in formal religious organization and through the relation of this to national political organization. It is particularly important that the two themes cross-cut each other. Thus England, HoUand, and Prussia became Protestant powers, whereas France, after a near-miss of Protestant ascendancy, became a Catholic power, but one which allied itself with Protestant powers against the Haps-burgs and others. Of course the cultural ferment of the Renaissance was very important in the background.
The development of the European system seems to me to have depended heavily on the inheritance of certain elements of common culture and institutions from the ancient world. These were both religious and secular in the usual senses. The Church, however, not only incorporated certain crucial elements of the Jewish religious tradition, and the Christian innovation itself, but certain structural patterns which derived from the Creek polls and from Rome, especially at the legal level. Similarly Roman law was so widely influential that through its incorporation into Canon Law, the broad ideal of a "roman" state never died, and the institutional traditiont of the polis survived in the traditions of "municipal" organization, including the Italian and Rhenish "dty-states." Clearly, as the recent "Ecumenical" movement makes clear, the Reformation was 3 process of differentatioo within Western Christianity, not the introduction of a "foreign" element into it, nor a total "segmentation" of the religious system.
These combined cultural and institutional commonalities, however, were clearly, in the European case, related to an underlying "variegated-

lame general character. The crucial early "segmentation" was the split between the Eastern and Western territories, reflected above all in the usage of the Greek as distinguished from the Latin language, and the "orthodox" as distinguished from the "Catholic" church. Only in the later modem phase-did the question of the inclusion of the "East" in this sense arise seriously again, focusing of course on Russia, since the "Middle East" was for long blamic, then sodo-politically quite chaotic.
This regional difference then had to do with such factors as, first, the-old locus of culture and political authority (Italy) and the movement of the center of gravity of both economic and political interests north of the Alps-
-starting with the definition of the Holy Roman Empire as the "German Nation." Then the difference between the currently opening sea frontier, ranging from the Iberian Peninsula to England, as distinguished from the-land frontiers, of which Austria and Prussia were the prototypical guardians, became another major focus of differentiation. The integrative role of France was very directly associated with its location at the intersection of the processes of religious and political differentiation.
It is my view that these foci of variation have come gradually to be-buflt into the structure of the modem system. The fact that these foci repre-Mnt a very broad pattern of internal functional differentiation may be taken' rone of the principal conditions of the development of the modem system. "Rris broader, more variegated set of components is a condition that the-Roman Empire even at its height could not, I think, have satisfied. That it was satisfied in later times set the stage for a process which I should treat M being probably as important as that of differentiation, namely, what I hvc been calling inclusion.
THE PROCESS OF INCLUSION
I think of inclusion as the process by which structural component? "fck'h have been either peripheral to a social system, or on its boundaries but "outside," are brought into a status of fuller integration in the system and hence with its oilier components. This integration can be defined either "fth respect to the dimension of stratification, i.e., in some sense the hier-: tbical dimension, or that of qualitative functional differentiation, or of course some "diagonal" combination of the two. Inclusion may also refer tocontinuing retention in the system of elements which have become sepa-
otrd from others by segmentation or differentiation, as distinguished from dmr "extrusion."

line along which inclusion processes have taken place in a previous time period may become, at a later stage, an axis of differentiation. Thus perhaps the most massive inclusion process underlying the European system of modem societies was that of the "Germanic" world which was sufficiently brood to comprise not only "Germany" but the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian complex, i.e., in a very broad sense those peoples speaking languages not of Latin derivation, nor of Slavic, nor the residual Celtic, or Finnish, or Hungarian enclaves.
In the Roman imperial period, the Roman "colonization" of these areas lhat did take place consisted mainly of establishing frontier outposts, such as the line along the Rhine, and Vindobonum near Vienna, Britain was far more fuBy "colonized" than other areas, and there is a highly significant relation between its early Roman occupation and the "conquest" by the Nonnans nearly a millenium later. Hence, there is a sense in which it can be said that France-"Gaul"-was predominantly "Latin" with a non-Latin substratum, and that Britain was predominantly "Germanic" with a Latin substratum. This balance seems to me clearly to relate to their capacities to assume lead" functions in the modem system.
However, when the basic processes of differentiation that destroyed the "'Mediaeval" system crystallized, the great religious division broadly followed the earlier ethnic-regional lines. The Reformation was clearly a predominantly "Germanic" movement, whereas the Catholic Church, especially to the Counter-Beformation, was predominantly Latin. Indeed, as 1 have suggested, this differentiation goes back to the Middle Ages, in that the Church at that time was mainly Latin in orientation, while tlie Empire was of the "German Nation." With the migration of political power and economic development north of the Alps, a "material" underpinning of the Befomiation was clearly present.
These lines of differentiation are still important in the political party alignments of European countries.14 This ethnic-regional inclusion process was predominantly "lateral" in terms or our main functional paradigm, and helps to explain the nature of East-West differentiation within the modem system. Since a major development of the early modem period was also that of territorially independent political units, the process of inclusion on the vertical or stratification axis was not so visible as a phenomenon of the system as a whole. That the main structure of European society inherited a "class" axis of differentiation goes almost without saying. As Bloch noted, oAc crucial phenomenon was the institution of aristocracy, which became

the main focus of European "feudalism" even in the sense in which Marx,, rather vaguely, formulated its characteristics.
It can then be said that the "core" of the emerging modem system consisted in the combination of "church and state" but with the church focused in the first instance on the religious orders, and the "state" on the aristocracies, with monarchs in the position above all of primus inter pares-after all the heads of aristocratic lineages were very generally called "peers," not only of each other but of royalty itself. From this reference point on, we can speak of a grand scale process of inclusion of the "common people" into statuses of "fulF membership in their respective societies. There have been a number of aspects of this process, too complex to follow here. However, let me mention that, in English development, the concept "common" emerged at two particularly strategic points.
The first of these is in the conception of the Common Law, which was. as distinguished from "manorial" law, common to the whole realm, but also defined the rights of "Englishmen" whether they were aristocrats or not, i<., it was law for "commoners." This development was clearly one in the direction of institutional ization of a "societal community" which was not confined to aristocrats. The second development was the conception of the British Parliament as consisting of two "houses," a House of Lords (Peers), ond very significantly, a House of Commons. It is of course true that in the early periods most of the members of the latter House were members of the "gentry" rather than of the "common people" in the more radically dem~ ocratic sense, but its composition was open-ended in the downward direction oF the social status scale, and it was capable of evolving into a legislative assembly representative of the "people" as a whole.
In a more dramatic way the "democratic revolution" came to focus in-Fiance with an abrupt shift from a monarchical-aristocratic regime to one which represented the "people" as citizens-Citoyen was the central symbol of the French Revolution. In those aspects of the process of inclusion which have come to be called the "democratic revolution," England and France performed one of their most important "lead" functions in the earlier phase? of the modem system of societies, England, significantly, coming first since ibe two basic developments fust noted occurred pre-emiently in the 17th CBDtiiry.
Two other modes of inclusion, which have figured prominently in the modem development, but also elsewhere, should be briefly discussed. The first Is the process of reintegration that occurs after a process of differenti-ttk)n which, in the nature of the case, generates such high tensions that the quite independent "civilizations" that, among other things, engaged in bitterly destructive wars with each other. Even the truce under the formula cuhis rvgif), eius religio, seemed to confirm this. As early as the 17th century, however, England and Holland introduced limited internal religious toleration. A major step was taken with the separation of church and state-as distinguished from their differentiation-in the American Constitution. From negative toleration of the right of religious dissent, then, there has been a gradual process in the direction of what today is usually called "eo-umenidsm": the positive inclusion of plural religious groups in a single "moral community" (in Durkheim's sense) which comprises the societal communities of most of the societies which are members of the modem system." This inclusion has led widely to a process of differentiation whereby "church" religion has become differentiated from what Robert Bellah," in his very illuminating conception, calls "civil" religion. The latter can, of course, be shared by members of plural denominational groups.
The second type of inclusion process has been intimately associated with the reintegration just discussed, but is in certain respects different. In the case or the inclusion of the "Germanic" world discussed above, whole societies were "brought into" the European system by processes which i comprised both military conquest and political consolidation, as well as ; ;
religious proselyti7.ation. The case in which this has occurred on the largest ? scale Is the United States, wherein mostly unorganized population elements 1, wftfa differing religious and ethnic heritages have immigrated into a host ..; :
society. Then, provided they are not to be temporary visitors, the question ^ nahiraDy arises as to what their status and that of their descendants is to be in the host society.
In the American case it seems to be clear that there has been an important interactive process involved. Though most immigrants, starting with Negro slaves, have entered the society in relatively low status positions, tha : | presence of very large immigrant groups and the fact of the society's rcl- o :
atfve openness to social mobility have enoourged a general trend to plu- .1 [ ratization of the social structure. Religious ecumenicism is one of the main outcomes; indeed it is at least probable that the American example has accelerated this process for Western society as a whole. There has also been ethnic pluralism which is related to religious ecumenicism in complex ways. Thus the predominant elements in the U.S. Roman Catholic religion are highly diverse ethnically and these groups, e.g., of Irish, Italian. Polish,

French-Canadian. Latin American origin, have been Juxtaposed with each other in a way quite different from the European situation involving the same ethnic groups. The "pull" of this ethnic ecumenicism has at last begun powerfully to put pressure for the enhanced inclusion of the Negro minority.
Such pressures toward pluralistic inclusion could not, however, Iiave operated as effectively as they have, had the more general social structure not, in certain respects, favored such inclusion. Not only did the United States have a very liberal immigration policy in the decisive period, but it did not exert the strongest conceivable pressure toward full "assimilation"- though many have asserted ideologically that it did. Not only was there relative religious freedom, but also freedom for private educational programs and other organizational initiatives based on ethnic lines.17 However this may be, the American societal community which has emerged is, though uniformly English-speaking, no longer a WASP (white. Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) community, but an ethnically and religiously pluralistic community, however important the remaining "discriminations," notably by race, may be.
Dealing with certain phases of the problem of analyzing the processes of inclusion has led us to shift attention from the level of the system of societies to that of the internal processes of particular societies. Before taking np the important question of the more general relation between the two levels, however, it is well to discuss briefly the other two categories of the paradigm of a phase of progressive developmental social change with which I have been working in recent years, namely what I call "adaptive upgrading" and "value-generalization."
ADAPTIVE UPGRADING IN RELATION TO INTEGRATION
By adaptive upgrading, I mean enhancement of the capacity of an action system-in this case a social system-to maintain and generate resources which can serve to improve the system^s level of adaptation to tlie environments in which it is situated. Relative to the attainment of system-goals the adaptive function is generalized; it involves resources which are relevant to the attainment of plural and alternative goals. At the social system level economic resources are prototypical in this sense, as fluidly available through the use of money and the market mechanism.
In the above characterization of the adaptive function I have deliber-

ately used the word environment in the plural. The common sense of sodal science is still deeply imbued with the conception that there is one en-viluumontapd it is "obviously" the physical environment As human beings^ bowerver, we are very much involved in interaction, not only with the physical world in the narrower sense, but with the nonhuman part of the organic world. At the action level, then. the social system must treat human be-hxvforal organisms, including those of its own members, as environmental obfectx. "Ilie same kind of reasoning leads us to treat the personalities of individuals, including societal members, as environmental to the social system, and finally also the cultural systems with which it is involved. Of course a social system must also include other social systems in the environmental category of the society, especially other societies.
Certain imperatives of the human relation to the physical and non-human organic environments have clearly given a certain premium to the economic aspects of adaptation, which has a special relation to these environments. However, the prominence, on occasion, of the health complex should warn us that the adaptive function in relation to our own organisms is far from negligible, and the prominence of education has emphasized even more the importance of personalities. Such considerations suggest that the very special prominence of economic considerations which has characterized the period of the industrial revolution, extending in some respects into our own time, is a function of a special combination of circumstances rather than of a universally "inherent" relation between man and his physical-organic environment Such a point of view relativizes the "economic interpretation of history" in a double sense: First, it challenges the generalized predominance of "economic factors' in the determination of human action and, second, it suggests that such predominance as economic factors have varies as a function of a complex constellation of circumstances, many of which are predominantly noneconomic in character.
Indeed I suggest that Western society has been to a high degree adap-uvefy oriented. This means above all two things. First, it has been oriented toward the management of its relations to its environments, i.e., their "control." if this concept is properly understood. One aspect of this is the concern for active adaptation as distinguished from passive adjustment, the latter being that which was very prominent in the earlier discussions of organic evolution. Secondly, however, as between the two basic functions involving stress on orientation to the external, environmental world, priority has tended to run in favor of the adaptive as distinguished from the system-goal attainment complex-of A over G in our functional shorthand. Thus my ...
on the other-rather than the highly centralized, hierarchical ones, e.g.. Prussia and the Soviet Union.
Within this framework there has been not one but a series of environmental foci of adaptive processes, with corresponding variations in the structures and processes of the internal system. The process which is here called "upgrading" includes a trend toward the salience of environments progressively higher in the cybernetic scale. It is apparent, however, that this trend has not been fully uniform because it has been intertwined with nonadaptive functional exigencies, notably the integrative.
Within the cultural framework of which Roman Catholicism and the recently differentiated Protestantism were the main features, the first major adaptive process which belongs to the complex of modem societies seems to have been "political" in a special sense, namely the emergence of the territorial states from the matrix of the Empire. This placed a heavy adaptive-goal attainment stress on foreign affairs which has in certain respects persisted ever since, though Just what the continuities and changes have been raise complex questions.
It seems that this political focus brought the functional problems of societies sufficiently "down to earth" so that, at a societal rather than only a focal level, a much more differentiated concern with strictly economic exigencies could develop. This development, again very broadly, may be said to have occurred in the two main stages of the "commercial revolution" which was part of the efflorescence of the l7th century and came to be centered in the Northwest corner after initial developments during the Renaissance in Italy and the Rhineland. The great "issue" at this stage was
thflt nf "mercantilism," namely the role of government in the control of economic interests and processes. '
These adaptive processes soon came to be balanced by somewhat cor" n-tpnnding ones in the integrative sector. The developing symbolization of itatehood, including palaces, the trappings of courts and the like, certainly belong in this category. But probably the most important process in the rarly modem era was the development of legal systems, mainly a modem-i?ed Roman law on the Continent of Europe, but a more distinctive system in the English Common Law which, however, developed continuously from Roman Law origins. These developments laid the foundations of what T. H. Marshall called the "civil" component of the modem institution of citizen-ihip which he particularly exemplified by the "rights of Englishmen."18
The second main stage of economic upgrading was the "industrial revolution." gathering force in the later 18th century and penetrating nui^h

I'^alifO -deeply into the social structure, especially through the enormous cpread of what we now call "occupational" roles and the organizations in which they function.
I think that what is ordinarily called the "democratic revolution" ibould be considered to be in the first instance a new set of repercussions centering in the integrative sectors of modem societies, following the im-men>e changes in the relations of these societies both to the other societies tbtt iEnpfnged on them and to their physical-organic environments. The latter relational changes took place primarily through technological and economic mechanisms. The relation of the "democratic revolution" to the process of inclusion as discussed above is nearly obvious. Characteristically the KngUsh version involved a rather gradual movement of the inclusion prooesi downward in the sodal scale from the aristocracy-T. H. Marshall's account of the British growth of the citizenship complex admirably exemplifies tfrfs.1' By contrast the French development was much more oriented to foreign relations and hence "patriotism"-thus the Marseillaise remains to this day as the symbolic song both of the Revolution and of French nationalism. This is not true in the same sense of "God Save the King."
The democratic and the industrial revolutions, taken together, raised acute problems about the integration of modem societies, the first centering almost directly on the question of what constituted a "member" of such a sodety, i.e., a citizen; the second centering more indirectly around the question as to what the allocation of human resources to economic production meant for the other aspects of the status of the "labor force." These two functional problem complexes clearly dominated societal "concern" through most of the 19th century and into the present cfcie.
Another integrative thrust, connected especially to the adaptive developments of the industrial revolution and surely importantly related to political democracy, is that which Marshall has called the development of the "sociaT component of citizenship, eventuating in what is often called the "welfare state."20 This is essentially the public guarantee of minimum standards of access to the conditions of "welfare" for the whole population of a modem society, especially protection against destitution through unemployment and through the social and organic disabilities of old age. However, access to health services and to educational opportunity, which wiD be discussed presently, have also figured prominently.
These integrative strains operating in modem societies clearly have had something to do with the emergence of three new adaptive concerns relative to three of the sodal system's environments. These are respectively the

"human-organic," the cultural, and the psychological or the level of die personality.
It is surely significant that the second half of the 19th century saw an altogether new level of concern with problems of health, mostly at the level of the organism. This of course was bound up with the new potentialities which grew out of the extension of the science and technology, which had "worked" in relation to the physical environment, to the emergence of the "life sciences" and with them new technologies for dealing with the somatic problems of health. The most sensational development in this connection was Pasteur's discovery of the role of bacterial infection and the opening up of maJor possibilities of its control.
THE EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION
By this time, however, the "educational revolution" was well under way. This can be considered to be a dual process. One side of it, taking root " little before mid-century, was the process of universalization of formal education, beginning with simple literacy and gradually moving up the educational ladder. It is of course well known that early in this century in most ot the modern societal world, elementary education had been nearly completely universalized. Russia of course lagged but has caught up rapidly.'In the middle third of the present century, especially in the United Stales, a relatively analogous pattern in tlie universalization of secondary education has gone far, and starting near the middle of the century we have teen the beginning of mass higher education which seems to point in the direction of universalization.
It does not seem necessary to elaborate further on this much-discussed development. From the present, formally analytic point of view, it mnv be interpreted to be a highly active process of adaptation between the social 'tvstem and the personalities of individuals; in that sense it is part of the *>odalEzation" process about which much has been said in recent years. It b thus hy no means simply a process of "adaptation to" personalities on the part of social systems, but first, of modification of them in directions of functional significance to the social system of reference. This involves a process maIoROus to the "mastery" of the physical environment by technology and the "conquest" of disease by modem medicine and public health measures ri the somatic level.
There is, however, another and subtler aspect of the process, and one hi which the concept of "mental illness" provides a better model than does that of somatic illness as indicated in the classical meaning of "sn'pntifip

Ac interpenetration of social and personality systems through the "intemal-ization" of the normative structures and symbols of culture and of "social objects," both collective and individual. Of the many complex consequences of such a development, a particularly salient one concerns the undermining of many of the traditionalistic and ascriptive components of social status and "security'* in such statuses. These processes occasion still another complex of integrative problems, about which something will be said presently.
Before entering into that, however, I want to emphasize that the educational revolution, if I may call it that, has not been an isolated phenomenon but has developed, especially at the levels of higher education, in very close relation to a "cultural revolution" which has centered in the area of cognitive rationality, namely, the growth and other forms of development of philosophy and science. It seems to be signiBcant that the two great phases of the development of the system of modern societies, the 17th century and the 19th to 20th, have been integrally connected with major developments in both philosophy and science, perhaps particularly the latter. In the case of the second of these main phases there have been, of course^ major new developments in the area of physical science, but also for the first time a high peak of development of the biological sciences with their medical and other applications, and a not yet so impressive, but still far from negligible development of the action, behavioral, or social sciences as they are variously called.
In a sense including empirical validation, theoretical sophistication, and differentiatedness, we can speak of a modem system of the intellectual disciplines which, however impressive its antecedents may have been, is a new phenomenon of the cultural world. This of course has become basically "international" and is not bound to any particular national unit of the system of societies, nor is it bound to any particular "ideological" position.
Elementary, and for the most part secondary, education should still utilize essentially the received cultural bases. There was a process of societal adaptation going on in that these "given" cultural factors came to play a new role in the personal orientations and societal concerns of modem societies. At the level of higher education, however, the educational process as such came to be involved most intimately with maJor processes of cultural innovation, especially those usually categorized under the rubric of "research."
We might, in a certain sense, suggest that these circumstances established a special kind of society-environment relationship. It is generally true that, from both the perspective of the social system and that of the per-

intellectual disciplines constitute a "special" kind of societal-environment relationship. Thus under the heading of "charisma" there has been much discussion of the process of change at both the levels of constitutive symbolism and moral-evaluative symbolization.21 Here perhaps Weber's comparative studies in the sociology of religion constitute the prototypical analytical statement of the problem. Weber's "exemplary prophet" seems to typify the creator of new constitutive symbolism; his "ethical prophet," that of new moral imperatives. Distinct in important ways from both of these have been the concentration on what I have called "expressive symbolization" which in its most differentiated form concentrates in what we know as the "arts." It is perhaps significant that the term "creative"-which in our religious history was a special prerogative of the divinity-has settled more on the artist than any other order of cultural specialist, even the religions. Certainly there is far more resistance to characterizing a scientist as "creative" than an artist. The fact that the scientist is bound by obligations
of fidelity to the "constraints" of environmental considerations-sometimes called "the facts"-while the artist is permitted to be much more freely
"imaginative," may have something to do with this intriguing linguistic usage.
However this may be, what I count to be the fourth main category of content of the cultural system, namely that centering on "empirical cognition" and its products, has come to occupy a special place in both the cultural environment and the cultural constitution of modem societies. The sense in which this place is special may in the first instance be looked at in terms of the pattern of cultural differentiation. The most important single step in this differentiation has been the "secularization" of various branches of culture, among which the intellectual disciplines loom very large.
In the first instance it may be noted that empirical cognition is the adaptive subsystem of cultural functioning and that for this reason it can he expected to play a special part in processes of adaptive upgrading. Furthermore its focal position in the system of formal education generally wrests that there has been a kind of "spiral" of development from the commercial and industrial revolutions (the "counterpoint" in the integrative context being the democratic revolution and the rise of nationalism) to a MW predominantly adaptive phase, in which a new level of empirical
knowledge and its utilization by a highly educated population has assumed l central place.
For this reason the strong stress on adaptive function in the value

systems of modem societies is clearly significant-and I have called this primary value pattern, with special reference to the American case, "instni-fneotal activism." The combination of the development of science and of higher education has given rise to an immense new proliferation of technologies, very conspicuously in the physical-engineering fields, but also in fields of applied biological science and partially of behavioral science. It has also given rise to an immense increase in the numbers and the relative importance of the professions in the occupational structure, including of course the "academic" profession.
This complex within the professions has come to embody, although with structural variations in the different societies, the dual functions of teaching at levels of higher education and of "research" or institutionalized provision for the continuing advancement of knowledge. Even where a large proportion of relatively "basic" research is done in specialized institutes, this development has elevated the institutions of higher education, especially the universities, to an especially salient position in the most recent phase of the development of modem societies. This is perhaps particularly true of the United States where, on the one hand, the research and the teaching functions tend to be combined in the same groups and where, on the other hand, mass higher education has extended furthest.
The impact of the educational revolution has of course been spreading through sectors of the society other than the primary centers of innovations involved in it, as happened also with the industrial and democratic revolutions. The contributions of recent technology to the standard of living are clear as well as more recently in the context of the salience of the problem of environmental pollution. The growth in importance of the professions has also brought about a mafor change in the nature of instrumentally oriented collectivities, notably in industry and government, in such a way as to make obsolete, in important respects, not only Marx's picture of the "capitalistic" firm, but also Weber's of bureaucratic organization and its predominance in both business and government. Related to this of course is the general upgrading of the labor force, very conspicuously by the elimination of very large numbers of unskilled tasks through mechanization and automation.
Two further sets of repercussions, however, are of special interest here. 'Vhe first concerns the relation of the educational revolution to the integrative function, while the second set of repercussions will serve as a transition to a brief discussion of the fourth of the central processes of structural change which I have been reviewing here, namely, value generalization. Both the industrial and the democratic revolutions occasioned major social disturbances. The events in France in the Revolutionary period, from

in many other countries for several decades are familiar.22 In the case of the industrial revolution, various kinds of "labor" disturbances look place, the most important developing toward the middle of the 19th century.23 These included not only "protests" and movements toward unionization, but also the political labor movements, including the socialist parties.
The reasoning and evidence which connect these two sets of disturbances with the democratic and industrial revolutions respectively would lead one to expect that the educational revolution, if its consequences are as important as we have suggested, should also be the storm center of comparably severe social disturbances which are mainly generated by it and, though linking up with other sources of strain in the society, center more in it than at any other point. These disturbances should also have a special relation to problems concerning integrative functions because of the specially important dynamic relations between adaptive and integrative processes.
Clearly the most likely parallel phenomenon is student disturbance. There are two especially interesting features of tin's parallel. In the educational system, students clearly constitute, relatively speaking, a low-status group, as compared to members of faculties and administrative officers. In this respect they have had positions in some ways analogous to those of commoners by contrast with aristocrats, and of workers by contrast with owners and managers. Secondly, however, it has become increasingly and widely recognized that the spearhead of such protest or radical movements has not come from the most disadvantaged groups. Thus in the democratic revolution it has been the "bourgeoisie" rather than the lower class which has been in the forefront. Even the Parisian "sansculottes" were predominantly what we would call "lower-middle-class" people rather than the "poor." Similarly in the labor movement it has been the relatively skilled workers that have led rather than the mass of the unskilled laborers. Two considerations then apply to the student disturbances. First, it is college and university students who are the focus of disturbances, not those in secondary schools, to say nothing of primary schools. Second, it is students in the Institutions of higher standing rather than the more disadvantaged sectors of the system of higher education, who have been most disturbed.
There is, however, one particularly salient difference. While the *Tx?ur-(wisie," including the sansculottes, and the "proletariat" could be categorized as "classes," this designation is not appropriate for students, for the rimple reason that, increasingly with the spread of mass higher education,

they constitute a category of the stage-of-life course rather than one of ascription to lifelong status. Clearly, there is a complex of "mobility problems" for students, both with respect to access to higher education at various levels, and with respect to propects following the educational process,24 but in its primary "meaning" student status is not one of presumptively permanent inferiority. As a major focus of structurally conditioned disaffection, hence, it may be regarded as essentially a new phenomenon in the developmental pattern of modem societies,
Erikson has made a particularly illuminating suggestion25 about the symbolic meaning of student status. For the democratic revolution, the focal context of evil was subjection to arbitrary "authority," notably that of monarchical regimes which denied the legitimacy of citizen participation.2* Secondarily, the focus was "privilege" with special reference to the status of aristocracies. In Marxism, and the socialist movement more generally, it was "exploitation," usually defined primarily in an economic sense but including the conception that economic advantage was reinforced by political power.
Erikson's suggestion is that the current focus is neither of these, but "dependency." Thus he says that the common theme which links dissident students with the groups which they seek as allies in the United States- notably the "blacks," the "poor," women, and the "third world" as putative victims of "colonialism"-is their perception of common dependency on presumptively illegitimate organs of control.
I suggGSt that the following are the main structural background developments underlying these three dominant themes. The authority theme mainly concerned the process of differentiation between the polity and the societal community. The focal concern was that persons and groups ex' ercising authority, hence, using power, ostensibly in a collective interest, should be accountable to the membership of the societal community as a constituency-eventually on a "fully democratic" basis, though this took a lonH time to develop.27 The theme of "exploitation," in turn, has concerned nrimarily the differentiation of economy from polity. Of course, there have been' important complications connected with this process. In the earlier

phase, that of the "commercial revolution," the "business" community felt constrained by the power of government. The classical statement of this feeling is perhaps Adam Smith's famous attack on mercantilism. In the later phase, the "workers" felt constrained by the economic and, I think, in a more analytical sense, by primarily the political power of the "capitalists."
In the current rhetoric, focusing around student disaffection, these themes of attack on allegedly illegitimate authority, exploitation, and combined power, continue to reverberate. At the same time I think that Erikson is correct that there is a new and different note sounded by the dependency theme. This concerns the process of differentiation in the first instance between the personality of the individual and the social system. By contrast with the authority context, students feel not so much "dominated" as "constrained," and by contrast with that of economic class, not so much "exploited" as "alienated."
Put in formal terms, this "disturbance" constitutes a new point on a ^spiral" of societal community development which is parallel to that which shifted emphasis from the economic function to that of empirical cognition on the adaptive side. It constitutes a shift of focus from the level of the social system alone to that of the general system of action. Here the crucial medium is not authority-power, but the relation between performance capacity, and affect, i.e., the individual's attachment (cathexis and identification) in the social systems in which he participates. The primary trend, looking toward resolution of these severe conflicts, I should expect to lie in the direction of the conception of "institutionalized individualism" which leads to enhancement of the autonomy of the personality, but in the context of certain types of institutionalized structure. In relation to these problems, Durklieim has been the preeminent theoretical forerunner.
The knowledge side of the educational revolution derived from cultural developments, in the first instance in interaction with the social system In the areas of the social organization of education itself and of research. The developments of which we have just been speaking, on the other hand, derive mainly from developments in the system of personalities, in interplay with social system agencies of socialization, in the earlier phases primarily the family of orientation, but then with the system of formal education, and its closely associated peer group cultures, playing a prominent part.
However, we feel that the phase which has just been outlined is new tn thnt a special set of processes, having to do with socialization as well as predominantly cognitive learning processes, have developed at the level of higher education. It has been customary for sociologists and personality

tioa from adolescence. We feel, however,28 that mass higher education and attendant structural changes have brought about a new process centering about the status we call "studentry." This has very much to do with socialization for universalistically evaluated achievement, of which performance of the professional type of function is prototypical, but also for responsible membership and leadership roles, especially in associational types of collectivity, which includes the acceptance of authority both on the "receiving" end and in psychological capacity to exercise leadership and authority.
THE PROCESS OF VALUE-GENERALIZATION
For a very long time I have treated institutionalized value-patterns as a primary, indeed in one special respect the most important single structural component of social systems. What is often called the "content" aspect of a value system would concern the balance among the broadest types of orientation alternatives, such as between instrumental and consummatory emphases and between religious and secular emphases. In these respects the broadest evidence seems to indicate that the most firmly institutionalized value systems have considerable stability transcending the shorter-run change in the structure of particular societies-meaning time periods up to several centuries. Thus I should argue that the system of modern societies' has had a broadly stable pattern of value-orientation, which derives in the main from the "marriage" of Israelitic and Greek components in the Christian movement, notably as this became institutionalized in "western^ society."
The dimension of concern here, however, is a different one. It involves the primary point of articulation between the differentiatedness of a social system and its values. The basic proposition is this: The more differentiated the system, the higher the level of generality at which the value-pattern must be "couched" if it is to legitimate the more specified values of all of the differentiated parts of the social system. Thus in the background of modem societies the differentiation of church and state, whereby the "state" or secular society acquired religious legitimation, was fundamental, as was the Reformation and later, in the early modem period, the first phases of "secularization."*0
Perhaps the crucial point here is the institutionalization, in Durkheims sense, of a "moral community" which both cuts across "denominational" lines-in the more narrowly religious sense-and those of ethnic culture, but also includes legitimation of structures which are both "sacred" and "profane." Here I use "cutting across" to mean the inclusion, under a single legitimizing value-pattern, of components which are not only diverse and differentiated from each other, but many of which have, historically, claimed some sort of an "absolutist ic" monopoly of moral legitimacy. Thus clearly at one stage only "good Catholics" could he full citizens of many Western societies; at the height of nationalism, e.g., only "good Frenchmen," understood in an ethnic-cultural sense, could be full citizens; or, more recently, only "good members of the working class," with a presumptive eligibility for membership in the Communist Party, could be full citizens. In this context value-generalization is of course intimately associated with the structural "pluralization" of modem societies. A mafor component of what Karl Mannheim called "utOpias" may be considered to mark steps in value-generalization, such as the liberal-democratic and the socialist-communist Utopias.31
What, then, can we say about the process of value-generalization? First it must be conceived as involving the zone of interpenetration between cultural and social systems-as well, especially, as personalities-in such a way that a significant change in the social structure must at the same time comprise cultural change. The stimulus for such change can come from a wide variety of sources, most of which can be categorized under the heading of "strain" in the social system, including for example the strain over the problem of "usury" in the period of the commercial revolution82 and the strain over the problem of clerical celibacy in the Catholic church at present.
To state a framework within which further clarification can be sought three primary stages of specification of value-institutionalization can be stated. The first is what may be said to precede secularization of any serious sort, namely where values are directly ascribed to specific religious commitments or orientations. This is the familiar case of either a predominantly "traditional" situation or one dominated by an established religion where suh'icription to its tenets at all levels provided the criteria of moral accept-

ability as a member of the society. In the modern societal systems this position was under severe attack in the early phase and had already begun to ^gtveway.
-.-- Tie second stage is the one outlined above where "denominational pluralism" has become more or less fully established and religious particularism is transcended by a "moral" unity by virtue of which the society becomes a ^Enoral community," in Durkheim's sense, and which is also characterized by an "ecumenical" civil religion. The third stage or level concerns transcending this primacy of societal commitment in favor of a new kind of "moral autonomy" of the societal unit-in the "last analysis" the individual person, but within a framework of the sort referred to above as "institutionalized individualism." Here both of the other levels "survive" in the total pattern of value-orientation, and above all imply the second level as the term institutionalization has Just been used. There is, however, a new element in that the individual or other unit comes to be "free" within ascertain-ablfr limits, to define his own value-commitments, independently either of a received religious base or of the imperatives of societal moral authority.
What I have called the second level comprises the main pattern of differentiated societal functions-such as economic production, contribution to political effectiveness, or even to societal solidarity-but goes beyond this to sanction spheres of autonomy and initiative whether or not they "contribute" in the above sense. The familiar strictures on mutual compatibility of the modes of exercise of such autonomy of course apply, i.e., remaining within the limits both of compatibility with the interests of the societal system and not too greatly injuring the interests of other units of the system.
It is my view that a principal source of the turmoil in which modem societies are involved in their current phase has to do with the initiation arid spread of this extension of legitimate value-commitments to a new level of generality and hence inclusive tolerance of variation. If the "absolutizing" of me societal moral community, which I take to be characteristic of the Communist societies, is no longer legitimate, the question becomes urgent of the basis of which a viable mode and level of societal community solidarity can work out. The current mood seems to be one of loudly asserting claims to freedom from societal obligations, but these assertions, for which there are many historical precedents, will not just make the problem "go away." Perhaps the problem of violence, when and how it is Justified, how it shall be controlled, is in course of becoming the focal center of the value problems involved in this transition.
Any such threefold classification of levels must of course, on a more
think, fairly argue that within small limits the third level was briefly attained in the male citizen body of the more advanced Greek poleis in their culminating period-only very marginally for a few women. The conditions of consolidating this institutionalization, however, were not present, to say nothing of its immediate extension, though some of the best features of Roman Imperial society may be said to have constituted a partial institutionalization of it on a broader basis than in any previous case. In the modem world it is unevenly institutionalized in particular "national" societies, and to a considerable extent in "international" contexts, but its current status is both highly incomplete and precarious. A major extension beyond particular societies seems to me to depend on the institutionalization of a firmer and broader system of societies than we have yet seen. Such a process would entail a repetition of the stage-process on a wider set of system-reference bases. The general conceptual structure of the series I conceive to be a "spiral," which is parallel to that involving the adaptive factors in the technological, economic, and scientific series, on the one hand, and the integrative factors in the field of the generalization of affect, on the other.
To return to the problem of process. A first point concerns what I have called "value-pressure." Assuming that a value-pattern has in fact become internalized and institutionalized to a significant degree, discrepancy between the valued "ideal state" and the actual state of affairs becomes a source of strain. The commitment to the ideal then constitutes a set of factors exerting pressure toward changing the actual state in the direction of conformity with normative standards. This pressure is likely to be stronger in proportion as the value-pattern is "activistic," i.e., calls for positive goal-attainment and active adaptation rather than more passive "adjustment" to the system's environments.
A value-pattern, no matter how firmly institutionalized, constitutes only one major factor in the determination of social process,' though in cybernetic terms it is placed at the highest level. The factors of "interest," notably in the economic and political categories, are analytically independent as, when properly understood, are norms as distinguished from values. Moreover the va\ue-system itself is not simple but complex. It consists not only of a "master pattern," but also of many levels of subvalues, specified both in terms of level of the functions in the system which they regulate, and of qualitative differentiation among such functions-e.g., the' subvalues governing a business firm are different from those of a university. Nonvalue factors can, of course, operate in interdependence at every level and type of specification. This is one of the main reasons why maintenance

problematical-Bs This complicatedness of the value-system itself is clearly a ftmctioo of the pluralism and differentiatedness of the social system of Kawence.
Very broadly we may say that the "pressure" of interests tends to be "'centrifugal," with a built-in tendency to escape the "control" of values, whereof the tendency of the value-pattern's pressure is obversely "centrip-etol." Among action components and types other than values themselves, tfacn, the effect of the value-pattern tends to be selective in the sense of creating various difficulties for the types of actions which do not fit, and advantages for the ones which do. This is a process which is in certain respects, though by no means all, analogous to the process of natural selection in the organic world. There is also, of course, collective action directly oriented to the implementation of values, most conspicuously shown in crisis situations, though not always. Hence both the selective and the direct-ty impfamenfrive aspects of value-institutionalizations must aways be considered.
o The maintenance of what I have called the integrity of a value-pattern 'can occur in more than one way. Besides "implementation" in the most direct sense, which is the "moraF equivalent of "law-enforcement." it can occur through two other primary processes, namely specification, as )'ust lefaied to, and value-generalization. The two are, of course, concretely interdependent with each other, as well as with other factors in concrete social process.
- I have suggested that differentiation is in part a consequence of value-pressure. At the same time it creates problems from the point of view of integrity, namely, will the value-pattern, as institutionally "conceived" in Khickhohn's term, legitimize both parts of the newly differentiated complex, rather than onlv the one which existed prior to the step of differ-entiatioo? Thus in a classical example, when occupational roles came to he differentiated from those in kinship-based households, massively through die industrial revolution, a value-problem was created, which has reverberated for a long time, essentially around the question as to whether work outside the household is basically legitimate. The Marxian concept of the "alienation" of labor is clearly a negative answer to this question. Similarly when the societal community became differentiated from a religiously sanctioned collectivity, a process, often called "secularization," gave rise to the question of whether it did not constitute "simple" abandonment of religious commitments.
lie pattern of specification constitutes a meaningful linkage between

more general and more particular levels of generality. Hence, it is nearly obvious that, in order to bring new particulars together with old under a common general rubric, the general rubric may be redefined at a higher level of generality than before. The problem of integrity liere concerns the question of whether, in being generalized, the pattern does or does not maintain the same "orientational" character, i.e., whether the change is one of generalization to include new modes of implementation of the "essential" pattern or represents a step in the direction of "eclecticism," namely, willingness to tolerate types of action which are in fact incompatible with the value-pattern. The concept of value-generalization in my sense excludes the "eclectic" alternative.
The process of institutionalizing a new level of value-generality is very often fraught with conflict in concrete situations. Those genuinely committed to the old, and now inadequate, level are very likely to feel that any alteration of their concrete commitments is a surrender of integrity to illegitimate interests. This I have called the "fundamentalist" reaction. Along the lines of Smelser's analysis of collective behavior it may be said that strain tends, in proportion to its severity, to propagate defensive reactions upward in the cybernetic order, and that the appearance of conflict at what ostensibly is the level of values, is the "end of the road" at least within the oocial system as distinguished from other subsystems of action.
The tendency to "de-differentiation" among groups motivated to innovative social change is essentially another aspect of the same basic phenomenon. It is the attempt to legitimize the innovations by appeal to a more "primordial" level of values than can fit the newly possible structural manifold; it is also a resort which is very generally motivated in substantial part by an attempt to "discredit" the fundamentalists. The result tends to be a polarization of conflict at the value level, with both "poles" assuming a position of "value-absolutism." The conflicts attendant on the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the socialist opposition in the industrial revolution all exemplify this polarization. This pattern of polarization is also prominent in the conflicts of our own time.
In most cases it is intrinsically possible, though never inevitable, that tiich polarizations should be resolved by redefining the relevant value-IMttems on a level of sufficient generality to include both sides of the previous polarity. Thus we now have an "ecumenical" conception of basically Christian religion which includes both Catholics and Protestants, to say nothing of others. We have a legitimation of "liberal democracy" which in-dudes Iwth "elite" classes and the common people-with all the difficulties

of attenuation. If these historical interpretations are correct, a process of
value-generalization has been occuring as an essential ingredient of these processes.
Most generally. I should say that without a process of generalization at the value level, the other processes of basic and potentially "progressive" fOdal change which have been outlined here cannot eventuate in a stable new state of a social system. It is particularly important to distinguish between value-generalization and inclusion, which is the version of the more geoeral imperative of integration which has Bgured in the present paradigm, Too low a level of value-generality tends to impede inclusion and to favor polarization over that issue. Thus many innovative trends, particularly in our own time, press for new inclusions. Fundamentalists, in the above sense, tend to resist, and the proponents of change reciprocal^ tend to assert value-positions which cannot be generalized to include both. Indeed this combination of inadequately generalized value-commitments, With the "sponsoring" of or resistance to important new inclusions, is perhaps Ac most important formula for deBning a "revolutionary situation." Such conflicts may be resolved without actual revolution; or they may lead to revolution, with an eventual resolution which both includes and legitimizes what originally were both "sides"; or, of course, they may not ba resolved at all-one possibility in this category being segmentation: they simply go their separate ways. The realistic possibilities in this latter direc-tioo are, however, clearly limited.
PARTICULAR SOCIETIES AND SYSTEMS OF SOCIETIES
In the above discussion I have stressed the concept of system of societies rather than that of the particular society, because it is considerably less familiar than the latter and also because of its special relevance to the evolutionary perspective. Though I had intended, when I began the discussion, to devote more attention to premodem societies as systems, it seemed better to concentrate on the modem system as I got into the matter. Even so, within the limits of this paper. I have been able only to single out a few illustrative themes and problems rather than presenting a systematic survey.
In my own experience the emphasis I have used here is a product of a Idnd of three-stage, if you will in a rough sense, "dialectic" development of interest and theorizing. It began, as I stated, with exposure to the Ginsberg-Hobhouse version of comparative analysis. This was continued in the early Harvard course which, within a theoretical framework that was very loosely

rubrics such as economic, political, religious, kinship, and the like, and, on the other hand, to deal in a brief synthetic way with a series of "total" societies, e.g., European Feudalism, Greece, Rome, Ancient China, India. However rough and crude, this pattern of organization did contain the main axes ot later, more sophisticated conceptualizations.
It was perhaps a not unusual experience for sociologists with macro-social interests to become rather especially concerned with problems of the nature of their own society. In the very early 1940's, just as the crisis of Western society over Nazism was coming to the climax in the generalized Second World War, I introduced a course under the title "Social Structure of the United States," which, with a few interruptions, I have continued to
teach ever since.8*
I have very explicitly used my comparative interests as a means of trying to gain an improved perspective on the problems of American society- o task of particular difficulty for a student of it who is also directly involved h it at a time when its state has been one of rapid change and relative turbulence. Conversely, the relatively greater intensity and depth of study <rf American society has raised many problems and suggested interpretations which were relevant to a broader comparative perspective.
Over the years it has become increasingly clear that to achieve genuine perspective on more or less contemporary American society there had to be "historical depth" not only in the history of the United States, but of the wider "Western" system of which it was a part. To this may be added the consideration that America and other Western societies were coming into Increasingly significant contact with other societies which were not, except remotely, genetically derived from the same sources, notably of course those of Asia. Considerations such as these have led me to attempt, increas-frigly, to generalize from the more usual kinds of "historical" concerns to those which can be called evolutionary. This trend of thought coincided with a set of developments within biological theory and in general science- notably the "new genetics" and cybernetic theory-which indicated a far greater continuity between human socio-cultural evolution and that of the organic world than had been at all widely appreciated, especially after the social science revolt against evolutionary ideas to which I referred earlier.
My own specific work within this framework has involved two phases cr foci, exemplified by the two small volumes referred to in the Foundations of Modem Sociology series. The first of these is the very sketchy attempted codification of comparative-evolutionary ideas for premodem societies, including those outside the "western orbit" which have remained premodern, to the theoretical sense, well into the modern age.
I may perhaps single out two interpretive conceptions which have been central to that work, not for careful development, but illustrative mention in the present context. Some years ago I concurred with Robert Bellah in trying to work with a very tentative five-stage paradigm of societal evolution, as presented by him in his notable paper "Religious Evolution."86 Thfa scheme has constituted an important part of the analytical framework used in the two small volumes referred to. Apart from the land of concerns with the structure of the modem system which have been discussed above. there were two especially important theoretical pay-offs for me which clustered about Bellah's conception of the stage of "historic" religion.
The first concerns a remarkable historical situation in which apparently the main outline of the process of differentiation between the great civilizations of tile Orient and of the Western world, in the broadest sense, took shape. Considering the primitive character of communications at the time, ft is remarkable that near the middle of the first millennium B.C. there developed nearly simultaneously four very major cultural movements: Con-fucianism-Taoism in China, Brahmanism in India, the Prophetic movement in Israel, and the emergence of "philosophy" in Greece. What seems to be common to them is a much sharper level of differentiation between cultural and sodal systems-and somewhat less directly between both and personalities and organisms-than had been the case for "archaic" levels. The theme of rejection of the world appeared, something which Weber analyzed in his weD-known essay and to which Bellah brings a new sense of interpretation. This Acme was most pronounced in Brahmanism, but also prominent in the Taoist countercurrent to Confuciamsm, in the "Dionysian" countercurrent to the main Greek trends, and in the mystical undercurrents which became prominent in post-Prophetic Judaism.
Weber never attempted to systematize the pattern of differentiation of these four main cultural movements, all of which were either very specifically religious or included a major religious aspect. If, however, as Weber did not do, the four mid-millennium movements are treated together and separated from Christianity, it seems that they can at least plausibly be fitted into the four-function paradigm, namely, Brahmanism in the Pattern-maintenance cell, Confucianism in the Integrative, Greek classical in tha Adaptive, and Prophetic Judaism in that of Goal-attainment. The system-OS

reference here must be societal-cultural as a whole, though the movements were clearly associated with the process of differentiation on the social-cultural axis also. All four, taken together, constituted a cultural-social system at the most general level.
The two Oriental systems were clearly concerned with the emphasis (HI "immanence" of principles of divinity and related themes, as compared with the theme of "transcendence" in the Western cases. There is, however, another interesting difference. Both the Indian and the Chinese cultural developments arose within what were probably in their day the most "advanced" large-scale societies, and did not establish clearly differentiated subcollectivities with religious primacy within them. This is to say there was no structural situation at all closely analogous to the Mediaeval differentiation between Church and State which underlay the modem development. The largely, though not wholly, "traditional" order-in Weber's tense- was "sacralized" by Brahmanic and Confucian constitutive symbols:
the conceptions of transmigration and Karma and their relation to ritua] purity on the one hand, and those of Tao, Yang, and Yin and their relation to "propriety" on the other.
In addition to this "sacralization" of traditional social orders-a phenomenon which was quite new compared to cases like ancient Egypt-there was in both cases a more or less "monastic" safety valve for persons who were more radically committed to new religious patterns: the Taoists in China; the Brahmanistic "mystics" and the Buddhists in India. However for many centuries in both cases the sacralized traditional order prevailed, though this seems to have come into flux in the most recent period.
In the West, however, the two main culturally innovative movements orose, not in the principal large-scale societies, notably those of Egypt or Mesopotamia, but in small "marginal" societies, or, as in the case of the Creek Poleis, systems of societies, namely Israel and Greece. Partly because these societal systems were small in scale and marginal8* to the "big"
political systems, the whole sodo-cul rural system in each case could come to be differentiated from its neighbors in line with the cultural innovation. Thus Israel became, as "People," the societal institutionalization of a distinctive '"historic" religious orientation-the "religion of Jahwe"-in a sense that had not occurred in any archaic society. In parallel, the system of Greek Polels could become the institutionalized embodiment of the new culture of the "corporate rationality of a citizen body in accord with Nature," to put it in a very awkward and complex phrase.
As it happened, neither of these radical cases of institutionalization of a new cultural orientation turned out to be politically viable, in the sense of any realistic prospect of maintaining their independence relative to the "great powers" of the time. Indeed, both came to be absorbed into the growing Roman Empire. In the process of this absorption, however, the main cultural component came to be differentiated from the structure of the host society and, I think, largely because there had been a societal carrier fa the background, i.e., the "people" of Israel and the Greek "polls." Tlus it was possible for a basis to develop in social structure which could exert societal and not only cultural "leverage" for future development. The maintenance of precisely the societal integrity of the Jewish communities to the Diaspora is the outstanding "interim" example, but considerations of this sort underlay the crucial significance of the Christian Church.
As I put it in Societies97 Israel and Greece constituted "seedbed" societies, from the point of view of their impact on the future. Precisely because they became differentiated so far "out of line" with the main societal system of the time, they could not maintain their independence. But their cultural innovations survived. The Christian "breakthrough" was clearly a major cultural innovation beyond either the Judaic or the Creek. Part of "fts distinctiveness consisted in the cultural "marriage" between these two patterns. At the same time, however, both seedbed societies offered model) of societal organization which could be synthesized within the conception of the Church as an entity set over against the Roman Empire of the time.
what different directions, between the society of Mesopotamia and that of the Northeast comer of the Mediterranean. (Compare chs. 4 and 6 of Societies.) to particular a "city-state" component was common to both. From the Creek point of view the Mesopotamlans were not quite complete "barbarians" in the sense in which the "Scythians" were.

involving a special combination of a "people" in the Judaic sense and of a "citizen body" in the Greek sense.88
The "syncretism" which constituted this crucial cultural "marriage" was part of a very broad welter of syncretisms occurring decisively about this time, which notably included Egyptian and Persian themes-e.g.. the cult of Isis and Osiris and Mythraism.81' It thus seems reasonable to suggest that a decisive advantage of the Christian synthesis lay in the fact that it carried with it the Value and, even in part, the Norm basis for a pattern of firm collective organization, independent of the society within which it developed. It is of course quite clear that without the individualism and universalistic cosmopolitanism of Imperial Roman society, it could not have survived, to say nothing of being able to proselytize. Equally essential was the break with the Israelitic ethnic community since even a restructured "Judaism" could not have become the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Subject to conditions such as these, however, the makings of the social institution which became the Christian Church constituted a set of decisive factors in making not only the survival and spread of early Christianity within Roman society possible, but in making it possible, at a much later time, for Christianity to become the main cultural base of the unique development of modern society.40 The above very sketchy discussion of the differentiation among the "historic" religions, in Bellah's sense, and the special circumstances in which two of them in combination laid the cultural foundations of modem society will illustrate, I hope, the utility of the particular version of comparative and evolutionary conceptualization for the analysis of certain crucial features of premodem socio-cultural development which has been discussed hare. In this connection, again, the conception of a lystem of societies (and cultures) has been of critical importance.
In conclusion I should like to sketch out one more illustration, this time with reference to modem, up to very recent, developments. This con-

cans the problem, noted above, of perspective on the development of American society. It may be pertinent first to remark that my earlier predilections were, in line with the main intellectual currents at the time, first to emphasize the decisive importance of economic emphases, not only in the descriptive characterization of modern and especially American society as "capitalistic," but to carry through to the conception that this was not only a characterization but an explanation. Max Weber cast considerable doubt OD die latter set of inferences, but introduced still another note, namely, that of (he prevalence of "bureaucracy," not only in government but in the field of economic organization.
In the sense in which Weber's essay on the Protestant Ethic proved decisive for me in beginning to question the adequacy of the prevalent "economic interpretation" of social processes, if not of "history" as a whole, my beginning concern with the significance of the professions in modem society contained the seeds of a questioning of the thesis of the all-pervasive "dominance" of bureaucracy.41 a thesis which has received massive ideological reinforcement in recent years from the "New Left."
By that time I was thoroughly acquainted with Durkheim's work. Moreover, a fact that was particularly significant was that within the framework of Ac convergence of theory between him and Weber, which was so important to me, Durkheim was giving an emphasis in his interpretation of some of tile main trends of modem society that was different from Weber's emphasis on bureaucratization. It gradually became clearer that this pattern identified by Durkheim was closely associated with that of the professions and, up to a point, also with that of the economic market, precisely in contrast with the predominantly hierarchical stress of bureaucracy.
The conception, however, of a system of modem societies, which has been discussed at some length in the present paper, helped greatly to focus and crystallize views on this issue, with special reference to the "diagnosis" of American society in its recent phases of change. A certain pattern of continuity, as discussed above, was particularly clear, beginning with Ac case of England and Holland in the 17th-century phase of modem developme-nt, in contrast both with Prussia in particular, and with the older Counter-Reformation powers, notably Austria and Spain.
In this respect, then, the "hierarchical" aspect of British society, centering above all on the institution of aristocracy, could be seen as relative:
and in the system as a whole, one giving way gradually to a new level of "egaKtarianism" in America, especially perhaps in the phase described by

Tocqueville. This theme, however, not only connects with democracy in a political and a perhaps vague "social" sense, but also with the implications of the new levels of development of education and of the professions, as again broadly outlined above.
It has become my view that a highly bureaucratized social system, like that of the Soviet Union, can borrow and utilize such cultural and social components often, from certain points of view, more effectively than the societies which favored their original creation, but that, since the Middle Ages at least, the more creative centers of structural innovation of modern society have remained and are likely to remain in the future in the less "tightly" and hierarchically organized subsocieties of the system. The very fact that the United States has recently become a center of conspicuous turmoil, which many interpret as heralding its early decline, may on the contrary be a sign that it continues to harbor the seeds of major socio-cultural innovations which will be decisive for the future. The analogy to the turbulence of the 17th century in the European Northwest Comer is evident.
However this may be, I think it is correct that American society is in many respects the most individualistic, the most "collegia!," and the most universalistically oriented of the major units of the modem system, and that the accusations that it is uniquely "repressive," far from being true, constitute simply a case of a familiar ideological "reversal." The best previous case perhaps is that of the "liberation" of productive capacity through the industrial revolution which was, in the socialist movement, interpreted to be mainly a process of "exploitation" of the workers.
Whatever the merits or demerits of such perspectives, I think I can "ay that without the evolutionary and comparative frame of reference, I could not have remotely approached satisfying my intellectual conscience with respect to a sociological view of my own society. To me the intellectual need to understand what is going on in one's own social milieu and how it fits in a broad spectrum of antecedent structures and processes, and of rimilarities and differences with other currently extant social systems, are correlative and mutually imply one another. I do not think one can be a fint-rate interpreter of any current social situation without comparative and evolutionary perspective nor, vice versa, that one can be a good compar-itivi.st or evolutionist without the deepest concern for one's own society and the "meaning" of its characteristics and trends of change.

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