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modernization
in sociology, the transformation from a traditional, rural, agrarian society to a secular, urban, industrial society.

Modern society is  industrial society. To modernize a society is, first of all, to industrialize it. Historically, the rise of modern society has been inextricably linked with the emergence of industrial society. All the features that are associated with modernity can be shown to be related to the set of changes that, no more than two centuries ago, brought into being the industrial type of society. This suggests that the terms industrialism and industrial society imply far more than the economic and technological components that make up their core. Industrialism is a way of life that encompasses profound economic,social, political, and cultural changes. It is by undergoing the comprehensive transformation of industrialization that societies become modern.

Modernization is a continuous and open-ended process. Historically, the span of time over which it has occurred must be measured in centuries, although there are examples of accelerated modernization. In either case, modernization is not a once-and-for-all-time achievement. There seems to be a dynamic principle built into the very fabric of modern societies that does not allow them to settle, or to achieve equilibrium. Their development is always irregular and uneven. Whatever the level of development, thereare always “backward” regions and “peripheral” groups. This is a persistent source of strain and conflict in modern societies. Such a condition is not confined to the internal development of individual states. It can be seen on a global scale, as modernization extends outward from its original Western base to take in the whole world. The existence of unevenly and unequally developed nations introduces a fundamental element of instability into the world system of states.

Modernization seems to have two main phases. Up to a certain point in its course, it carries the institutions and values of society along with it, in what is generally regarded as a progressive, upward movement. Initial resistance to modernization may be sharp and prolonged, but it is generally doomed to failure. Beyond some point, however, modernization begins to breed discontent on an increasing scale. This is due in part to rising expectations provoked by the early successes and dynamism of modern society. Groups tend to make escalating demands on the community, and these demands become increasingly difficult to meet. More seriously, modernization on an intensified level and on a world scale brings new social and material strains that may threaten the very growth and expansion on which modern society is founded. In this second phase, modern societies find themselves faced with an array of newproblems whose solutions often seem beyond the competence of the traditional nation-state. At the same time, the world remains dominated by a system of just such sovereign nation-states of unequal strengths and conflicting interests.

Yet challenge and response are the essence of modern society. In considering its nature and development, what stands out initially at least is not so much the difficulties and dangers as the extraordinary success with which modern society has mastered the most profound and far-reaching revolution in human history.

This article discusses the processes of modernization and industrialization from a very general and primarily sociological point of view. It does so also, it should be remembered, from a position within the very processes it describes. The phenomena of industrialization and modernization that are taken to have begun some two centuries ago and that were not until much later identified as distinct and novel concepts have not yet arrived at any recognizable closure. The end of the story, if there is one, is thus not in sight, and the question of an ultimate judgment on the nature and value of this vast historical movement is unanswerable.

Becoming modern

The revolution of modernity

If one imagines all of human social evolution charted on a 12-hour clock, then the modern industrial epoch represents the last five minutes, no more. For more than half a million years, small bands of what we may agree were human beings roamed the earth as hunters and gatherers. With simple stone tools and a social order based on kinship ties they successfully preserved the human species against predators and natural calamities. In observing contemporary Australian Aborigines, the San (Bushmen) of southern Africa, the Eskimo, the Negritos in Malaysia and the Philippines, and Pygmy groups in Africa, a glimpse may be had of the social life of the Paleolithic period (Old Stone Age)—the oldest and most enduring type of human society.

About 10,000 BC some of these hunters and gatherers took to cultivating the earth and domesticating animals. It is this process that is somewhat misleadingly called the Neolithic revolution, implying that new stone tools were at the root of this vast change. It is now generally accepted that the new technology was not the principal factor.Nevertheless what took place was undoubtedly a revolution. Mobile bands became settled village communities. The development of the plow raised the productivity of the land a thousandfold, and in response the human population of the planet increased dramatically. More significantly, herding and  agriculture for the first time created a surplus of food. This allowed some members of the population to abandon subsistence activities and become artisans, merchants, priests, and bureaucrats. This division of labour took place in a newly concentrated physical environment. In the 4th millennium BC cities arose, and with them trade, markets, government, laws, and armies.

The technology and  social organization of the Neolithic revolution remained the basis of all civilization until the coming of industrialism. With remarkably few additions—the invention of the stirrup was an important one—what served ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt of the third and second millennia BC served as the foundation of all the states and empires of the ancient world, from China and India to Greece and Rome. And it served equally the European Middle Ages, which in some respects, notably in technology, actually fell back from the achievements of the ancient world. Not until the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe did humankind make another leap comparable to that of the Neolithic revolution.

It is against this very slowly evolutionary background that the revolution that underlay modernity must be seen. It is one of just two quantum jumps that human social evolution has made since the primal hunting and gathering stage of early Homo sapiens. The Neolithic or agricultural revolution produced, paradoxically, urban civilization; the Industrial Revolution lifted humankind onto a new plane of technological development that vastly increased the scope for transforming the material environment. In its speed and scale the change brought about by the Industrial Revolution has had, indeed, a greater impact on human life than the Neolithic revolution. Neolithic civilization remained throughout confined by a sharply limited technical and economic base; industrial civilization knows no such limits. Nevertheless, an understanding of agrarian society is essential to the analysis of industrial society, for it is largely through the contrast with its agrarian past that modern society stands out. The meaning of the modern is to be found as much in what it renounces as in what it aspires to.

The West and the world

It is not fully understood what produced the leap into modernity and why, just as some groups of hunters and gatherers gave rise to agrarian society, some agrarian societies gave rise to industrial society. What is clear is that it took place between the 16th and 18th centuries and that it began in the countries of northwestern Europe—especially England, the Netherlands, northern France, and northern Germany.

This could not have been expected. Compared to the Mediterranean, not to mention Arabic and Chinese civilizations, northwestern Europe early in the 16th century was backward, technically and culturally. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was still absorbing the commercial and artistic innovations of the Italian city-states of the Renaissance and making piratical raids, where it could, on the wealthy Spanish empire. It seemed an unlikely candidate for future economic leadership of Europe. Yet it was there that the changes took place that propelled those particular societies into the forefront of world development.

One reason advanced for this is that northwestern Europe was the origin and heartland of the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. In his great work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), the German sociologist Max  Weber suggested that Roman Catholicism and to an even greater extent such Eastern religions as Hinduism and Buddhism were essentially otherworldly religions. They placed doctrinal emphasis on religious contemplation and the life hereafter.  Protestantism, on the other hand, was predominantly a “this-worldly” religion. It broke down the distinction between the church and the world, between the monastery and the marketplace. Every man was a priest; everything he did, at work or at play, he did in the sight of God. Weber sought to show that Protestantism, and especially its  Puritan variety, developed a particular type of character that valued frugality and hard work. Protestantism particularly promoted a work ethic. For the Protestant, all work, all occupations, were in a sense a religious vocation.  Work was to be pursued with a fitting seriousness and order, in a spirit of rational enterprise that eschewed waste and frivolous adventurism. Such an attitude was admirably suited—though not intentionally—to the development of industrial capitalism. The Protestant nations, therefore, according to Weber, invented modern  capitalism and so launched the world on a course that it still follows. Some later historians have disputed Weber's thesis and have adduced evidence that the early development of capitalism and of industrial organization preceded the rise of Protestantism. In either case, their mutual accommodation remains striking.

In a similarly persuasive way, the rationality of the Protestant work ethic has seemed linked to the development of modern  science. This, too, took place largely in northwestern Europe in the course of the 17th century. In no other place, at no other time, was there anything like the scientific revolution of these years in England, France, and the Netherlands. It is true that the Industrial Revolution, inits early phases at least, did not depend on the theoretical science of Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, or others of the period. What was crucial was the  rationalist culture and the scientific habits of mind that this culture nurtured. Moreover, the scientific method of observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and verification could be applied not only to nature but also to society. Eventually, toward the end of the 18th century, what would later be called  social science—economics and sociology especially—began to find a place alongside natural science. The scientific outlook—skeptical, autonomous, applying fixed standards of observation to continually changing phenomena, to reach conclusions that were never to be considered more than provisional—became the hallmark of modern society.

Already, by the 17th century, western Europe had embarked on the course of transoceanic expansion that was to become one of its most notable features in the succeeding centuries. The  colonization of America, although uneven, added a vast new domain to the West. In wealth, resources, and physical power, the West took a commanding lead over the rest of the world. From the enormous potentialities of science and industry, it acquired a momentum and a dynamism that pointed to a future immeasurably grander than anything previously achieved. For the first time, moralists and philosophers began to conceive of the possibility that the modern world might come to be the equal and even the superior of the ancient world of Greece and Rome. The idea of progress, and with it that of modernism, was born. The world was growing in power and enlightenment and, so far as anyone could see, would continue indefinitely to do so. Western society was not merely plunging ahead on its own; it was paving the way for the rest of the world. As Karl Marx said, albeit two centuries later, “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”

The dual revolution

Modern society owes its origin to two great upheavals in the 18th century, one political, the other economic. Both were part of a broader pattern of change that, since the Renaissance and Reformation, had set the West on a different path of development from that of the rest of the world. This pattern included the  individualism and, in the end, the  secularism, that was the Protestant legacy. It also included the rise of science, as a method and as a practice. Both of these culminated in explosive events toward the end of the 18th century. The first helped provoke political revolutions in America and France. The second, in creating an atmosphere conducive to technological innovation, was one of the chief elements in the emergence of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.

The  American and  French revolutions established the political character of modern society as constitutional and  democratic, meaning not necessarily that every government thenceforward was of such character but that even those most conspicuously not so frequently claimed to be. From the time of those revolutions it became clear to practically all thinkers that no political system could now claim legitimacy that was not in some sense based on “the will of the people,” constitutionally expressed. It was this message that was so brilliantly spelled out by the clear-sighted French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville in his works, The AncienRégime and the Revolution (1856) and Democracy in America (1835–40).

That the new democratic legitimation could be, and would be, claimed by popular or constitutional dictatorships such as those of Napoleon III in France or Adolf Hitler in Germany only showed how central the double ideal of democracy and constitutional justification had become. But they were not infinitely malleable. The idea of tacit or implicit popular consent, resorted to by several old-fashioned monarchies and empires, fell before the march of modern democratic theory as developed from the American and French revolutions. In the United Kingdom this was done through a gradual extension of the franchise in the 19th century. In Russia and in eastern and central Europe, violent revolution, defeat in war, and centrifugal nationalist tendencies turned out to be the means by which autocratic intransigence was overcome.

But however accomplished—whether grudgingly conceded, seized in popular revolution, or imposed by modernizing elites—the democratic constitutional state has come to be accepted as in principle the only fully legitimate polity of modern society. States that deviate from the norm, as, for instance, the communist states of eastern Europe or the military dictatorships of Africa and Latin America, feel compelled to offer elaborate justifications of their conduct. These are sometimes outright denials that the regime in question is the antithesis of a constitutional democracy; generally, however, they take the form of pleading special or emergency conditions. Full democracy, at some time in the future, remains the professed goal. The doggedness with which most of this casuistry is advanced, often in the teeth of observable evidence to the contrary, is the clearest testimony to the normative strength of the democratic ideal in modern society.

The American Revolution added a further ingredient to the political form of modern society. It asserted the principle of  self-determination. Only those states were legitimate in which a people of common culture ruled for themselves a common territory. Foreign rule, or rule by an alien elite, as in the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, was unnatural. Only nation-states were natural political entities; only they were legitimate. “National self-determination” became one of the most powerful catchphrases of the liberal and radical ideologies that largely shaped the modern states of the 19th and 20th centuries.

That self-determination could be a highly ambiguous demand, as with democracy, was shown especially in the experience of central and eastern Europe, where the question of whose presumed nationality should be the basis of the state divided ethnic groups bitterly and murderously. Who, in the extremely mixed domains of what was Austria-Hungary before 1918, was to constitute an autonomous national group—Magyars, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Romanians? Only force would resolve the issue, so that modern Romania ended up with substantial Magyar and Saxon minorities inside its national boundaries while Yugoslavia contained a number of ethnic groups not much less various than those of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy which in part it was created to replace. But, once again, it was not thepractical difficulties that mattered. As with democracy, it was the pure ideal of  nationalism that became the irresistible force. And, once invented by the West, it could not be contained there. Along with democracy, it was one of the ideals absorbed by the colonies of the Western powers, and it became a powerful factor in the dissolution of Europe's overseas empires.

If the American and French revolutions laid down the political pattern of the modern world, the  Industrial Revolution in  Great Britain laid down the economic pattern. The changes that took place in Britain during the 19th century became almost a prototype of industrialization. To choose to industrialize—and not so to choose meant risking backwardness and dependence—was to imitate consciously the British Industrial Revolution. Great Britain was the pioneer industrial nation of the world; there simply was no other model to fix on. Even later, when it was clear that the British method of industrialization might not be exclusively valid or universally applicable, the general form of society that emerged in the course of the Industrial Revolution was widely regarded as typical.

Certain episodes and tendencies in the British case were pointed to as characterizing industrial development as such. These included the movement from the land to the cities, the massing of workers in the new industrial towns and factories, and the rise of new distinctions between family life and work life, and between work and leisure as notions meaningful to large classes of persons. Such features, with various others, were compounded into a powerful image of industrialism as a whole and wholly new social system and way of life.

The British themselves, it should be noted, did not contribute much to the promulgation of this image of industrialism, at least insofar as it was turned into a systematic account of society. Certain powerful symbols and images of urban and industrial life were indeed picked up from such English novelists as Charles  Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell. But it was left to others, from societies only just beginning to industrialize, to blend these artistic impressions (many of them not at all celebratory) into a systematic analysis of the new society. Foreigners such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx observed and reflected on the changes they saw in England. They were convinced that what was happening in Britain would be repeated, more or less exactly, in other societies as theyunderwent industrialization. Industrial Britain could be seen, therefore, as a social laboratory of inestimable value to those other societies. In works such as Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845), and Marx's Das Kapital (1867–1894),British experience was examined for the light it shed on the general process of industrialization and for what it suggested of future developments, there and elsewhere. Through such works, the British Industrial Revolution became the property not just of the British nation but of the whole world. All societies, it was felt, would have their “Coketowns,” the generic industrial town of Dickens' Hard Times (1854); all would have industrializing ideologies and institutions of the kind—referred to by Germans as Manchestertum—that 19th-century observers came to associate with the world's leading industrial city.  Manchester was indeed the symbol of the new industrial society, and hence the image of the world's future. “The age of ruins is past,” declared the British politician and novelist Benjamin Disraeli in his novel Coningsby (1844). “Have you seen Manchester?”

One consequence of this tendency to generalize the British experience was that the idea of industrialism itself grew in scope and significance. It came to symbolize and to embody not just the economic and technological changes that lay at its heart, but other political, social, and cultural changes that appeared to be organically connected with it, whether as causes, concomitants, or consequences. Thus, the democratic movement triggered by the American and French revolutions was seen as the necessary politicaltransformation that, sooner or later, must accompany all movement toward an industrial society. Similarly, changes in urban life, in family form, in individual and social values, and in intellectual outlook, were all seen as linked to industrialism. Industrial society came tostand as the epitome of modern society. And through the lens provided by industrialism, earlier developments, such as Protestant individualism and the scientific revolution, came to be seen as preconditions or presentiments of industrialism, elements incorporated into a systematic and more comprehensive movement that had its own compelling logic and momentum. Industrialism, it came to be agreed, was a package and had to be purchased as such.

The nature of modern society
General features

Modernity must be understood, in part at least, against the background of what went before. Industrial society emerged only patchily and unevenly out of agrarian society, a system that had endured 5,000 years. Industrial structures thus took much of their characteristic form and colour from the rejection, conscious or unconscious, of preindustrial ways. Industrialism certainly contained much that was new, but it remained always at least partly an idea that in both its theory and its practice was to be understood as much by what it denied as by what it affirmed. The force of the modern has always been partly a reactive force, a force that derived meaning and momentum by a comparison or contrast with, and by rejection or negation of, what went before.

Considered at the most general level, this point suggests a view of modernization as a process of individualization, differentiation or specialization, and abstraction. Put more concretely: first, the structures of modern society take as their basic unit the individual rather than, as with agrarian or  peasant society, the group or community. Second, modern institutions are assigned the performance of specific, specialized tasks in a social system with a highly developed and complex division of labour; in this they stand in the sharpest possible contrast with, for instance, the family in peasant society, which is at once the unit of production, consumption, socialization, and authoritative decision-making. Third, rather than attaching rights and prerogatives to particular groups and persons, or being guided by custom or tradition, modern institutions tend to be governed and guided by general rules and regulations that derive their legitimacy from the methods and findings of science. In principle at least, they are not the agents of particular individuals, such as a king or priest, endowed with divine or prescriptive authority, but act according to the rational and impersonal precepts formulated by “experts.”

These contrasts by no means complete the characterization of modern society, nor are they the only ones that might be drawn. Nevertheless, they do illustrate the dependence of the concept of modernity on past structures that form the basis of comparison andexclusion. Indeed, it is such a set of contrasts, not necessarily carefully distinguished, that most people have in mind when they speak of modern as opposed to traditional society.

With regard to the more positive features of industrialism, industrial society can best be thought of as consisting of an economic core around which other, noneconomic structures crystallize. In Marxist terminology, this is rendered in the more deterministic form of an economic base conditioning a noneconomic “superstructure.” This seems unnecessarily rigid and misleading. The relation of the economic to the noneconomic realm is mutual and interactive, as can be seen by considering the impact of scientific ideas on economic and technological development. Still, it is true to say that, fundamentally, it is the economic changes that most dramatically affect industrial society.

[ Last edited by songwei1765 on 2005-6-6 at 10:03 ]

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Economic change

Economic historians and theorists have been inclined to stress  economic growth as the central defining feature of an industrial as opposed to a nonindustrial economy. Thus, the British historian Edward Anthony Wrigley (b. 1931) declared that “industrialization is said to occur in a given country when real incomes per head begin to rise steadily and without apparent limit.” The American economic historian W.W. Rostow (b. 1916) popularized a similar conception in suggesting that with industrialization, the economy at a certain point “takes off” into “self-sustained growth”; all the relevant statistical indexes of the economy—investment, output, growth rate, and so on—take sudden, sharp, almost vertical upward turns.

Underlying this phenomenon of growth are certain core components of the industrial system. These include  technological change, whereby work is increasingly done by machines rather than by hand; the supplementing or replacement of human and animal power by inanimate sources of energy, such as coal and oil; the freeing of the labourer from feudal and customary ties and obligations, and the consequent creation of a free market in  labour; the concentration of workers in single, comprehensive enterprises (the  factory system); and a pivotal role for a specific social type, the entrepreneur.

It would be easy to vary and extend this list. Not all components are of equal importance, nor are all equally indispensable to the industrial economy. They are drawn largely from the experience of the first industrializing nations, in western Europe and North America. Later industrializers were able to dispense with some of them, or at least to try to do so. The Soviet  Union, for instance, industrialized on the basis largely of forced rather than free labour and made a point of doing away with entrepreneurs, while in  Japan the entrepreneur was throughout stimulated and sustained by strong state involvement in industrialization. Moreover, it should be remembered that states—as, for instance, Denmark and New Zealand—can industrialize largely through the commercialization and mechanization of  agriculture. Agriculture simply becomes another industry; farms are simply rural factories.

Even in this latter case, there is no place for a distinctively rural way of life in industrial society. Mechanization brings an increase in productivity that renders a large portion of the rural labour force superfluous. Even where agriculture remains an important part of the industrial economy, the proportion of the labour force employed in agriculture drops steadily with industrialization. This is the “sectoral transformation” that is one of industrialization's clearest and most obvious effects. A majority of the work force comes to be employed in the production of manufactured goods and in services rather than in the primary sector of agriculture. In both the UnitedKingdom and the United States, for instance, by the mid-1970s more than 95 percent of the employed population were in manufacturing and services and less than 5 percent in agriculture. Japan, as an example of a late developer, shows the same pattern: in 1970, more than 80 percent of the employed population were in manufacturing and services, and less than 20 percent in agriculture. These figures should be compared with the normal condition of preindustrial agrarian societies, where typically 90 percent of the adult population are peasant farmers or farm workers.

The vast increase in agricultural productivity which this sectoral change in employment signals is characteristic of industrialism. Industrial society breaks through the historic limits of scarcity. In the past, the potential for economic growth was always cut short by Malthusian checks on population, by limitations of food supply, or by the shortage of easily available raw materials such as wood. Industrialization permits the creation of large  food surpluses that can feed a largely urban population. The entire world, both on land and in the sea, is scoured for raw materials and further energy sources to supply industry. Science has so far proved remarkably effective at finding substitutes for those sources that have dried up and those materials that have become dangerously scarce. The British economist John Maynard Keynes suggested that, for the first time in human history, “the economic problem may be solved,” and that “the economic problem is not the permanent problem of the human race.” In the mid-1980s it still seemed reasonable to believe that industrialism promised growth for the foreseeable future, even that it might bring abundance to all.

Population change

There have been two major population explosions in the course of human social evolution. By the end of the Paleolithic period the world's human  population is estimated to have been between five and six million (an average of 0.1 person per square mile [0.04 person per square kilometre] of the Earth's land area). Following the Neolithic or agricultural revolution, the population made its first major leap, reachingover the short span of 8,000 years around 150 million by the year 1000 BC (2.6 persons per square mile).For the next two and a half thousand years there was relatively little change. World population had reached about 500 million by the middle of the 17th century. During this time any tendency for population to grow was punished by the Malthusian checks of starvation and pestilence. Only with the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century did population break out again from its Malthusian fetters.

From about 1700 there was a second and far more rapid population explosion. Since the late 1600s the world's population has increased more than eightfold, reaching 4.8 billion by the mid-1980s. On current projections it is expected to reach more than six billion by the year 2000 (which will mean an average of 42 persons per square kilometre of the Earth's land area). This gives some measure of the difference between the two population revolutions of human history: there has been a dramatic acceleration not simply in population but in the rate of increase of population since industrialization took hold. Between 1650 and 1850 the average annual rate of increase of the world's population doubled; it doubled again by the 1920s, and more than doubled, once more, by the 1970s.

If the time taken to double the world's population over the past 350 years is taken as a measure, then the doubling time is seen to havebeen shrinking fast. It took 200 years, to 1825, to double the world's population from 500 million to one billion. It took only 100 years toachieve the next doubling, bringing the total to two billion by 1930; and only 45 years to achieve yet another doubling, to four billion by 1975. There were signs of slowing in the last part of the 20th century, and clearly this accelerating pace could not last indefinitely. Even so, many experts predicted eight billion by early in the 21st century, a reduction in the doubling time to about 40 years.

It was in western Europe, with the Industrial Revolution, that the second population revolution began.  Europe's population doubled during the 18th century, from roughly 100 million to almost 200 million, and doubled again during the 19th century, to about 400 million. It was in Europe, too, that the pattern first emerged that has come to be known as the “demographic transition” (see population: Theory of the demographic transition). The populations of nonindustrial countries are normally stable (and low) because high birth rates are matched by high death rates. With industrialization, improvements in medical knowledge and public health, together with a more regular food supply, bring about a drastic reduction in the  death rate but no corresponding decline in the birth rate. The result is a population explosion, as experienced in 19th-century Europe. In time, however, as European societies showed in the early 20th century, the urbanized populations of industrial societies voluntarily lower their birth rates and population growth flattens out. A new population plateau is reached. Japan, industrializing some 50 years later than the West, provided an almost textbook demonstration of the pattern of the demographic transition. Its population grew rapidly after 1870, during its industrializing phase, and leveled off equally rapidly after World War II. In an even more speeded-up form, the Soviet Union in its century of industrialization that began in the 1880s illustrated the link between industrialization and population.

Does the demographic transition hold good for the developing societies known as the Third World? Nearly all of these countries experienced rapid population growth after World War II, at rates greater than had ever occurred anywhere in the West. Western aid and medical science spectacularly reduced the high death rates, often by more than 50 percent. But, unlike those in the West, the high birth rates showed little tendency to fall. Determined efforts in a few countries, such as Singapore, Sri Lanka, and China, were beginning to yield some results by the 1980s. But on the whole the attempts by national governments and international agencies to persuade non-Westerners to have smaller families had failed. One result was the persistence of predominantly youthful populations in societies that could least afford the burden of feeding and educating their nonproductive young. People under 15 made up more than 40 percent of the populations of the Third World, as compared with between 20 and 30 percent in the industrialized world.

It was argued that the birth rate remained stubbornly high in these societies partly because industrialization was so slow and fragmentary in the Third World. In addition, where any significant development had taken place, as in Brazil or Malaysia, it had only really affected a small elite; the mass of the people were untouched. Thus, the reasons people in the industrialized West chose to have fewer children lacked cogency in underdeveloped countries. It remained rational for the bulk of the population to continue to have large families both to share in manual labour and to provide security for parents in their old age. Lower fertility would come, it was argued, when wealth was more evenly distributed and social security systems well established.

Urbanism as a way of life

Industrialism does not simply increase numbers; it distributes them in particular ways, concentrating mass populations in cities. Modern life is unquestionably  urban life.

It may be argued that it was in the cities of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome that a distinctively urban existence was first brought to that pitch of refinement that signifies an advanced civilization. Certainly for those fortunates who were free citizens the Athens of Pericles provided an agreeable existence. The Italian cities of the Renaissance, too, provided a distinctly urban culture.

Industrial urbanism differs from preindustrial urbanism in two ways. The first is in its quantitative reach and intensity; the second is in the new qualitative relationship it sets up between the  city and society.

For all the culture and sophistication of the preindustrial city, it remained a minority experience. Full participation in urban life was available to no more than the 3 or 4 percent of the population who were city dwellers in 3rd-millennium-BC Egypt and Mesopotamia and to the 10 to 15 percent of Romans who lived in cities at the zenith of imperial Rome (but who were heavily dependent on food supplies from North Africa). These latter represent a high point of preindustrial urbanism.

Industrialization brings a growth in trade and manufactures. To serve these activities it requires centralized sites of production, distribution, exchange, and credit. It demands a regular system of communications and transport. It multiplies the demand that political authorities establish a dependable coinage, a standard system of weights and measures, a reasonable degree of protection and safety on the roads, and regular enforcement of the laws. All these developments conduce to a vast increase in urbanization. Whereas in typical agrarian societies 90 percent or more of the population are rural, in industrial societies it is not uncommon for 90 percent or more to be urban.

The growth of cities with industrialization can be illustrated by the example of the  United Kingdom. In 1801 about a fifth of its population lived in towns and cities of 10,000 or more inhabitants. By 1851 two fifths were so urbanized; and if smaller towns of 5,000 or more are included, as they were in the census of that year, more than half the population could be counted as urbanized. The world's first industrial society had become its first truly urban society as well. By 1901, the year of Queen Victoria's death, the census recorded three-quarters of the population as urban (two-thirds in cities of 10,000 or more and half in cities of 20,000 or more). In the span of a century a largely rural society had become a largely urban one.

The pattern was repeated on a European and then a world scale as industrialization proceeded. At the beginning of the 19th century, continental Europe (excluding Russia) was less than 10 percent urbanized, with respect to cities of 10,000 or more; by the end of the century it was about 30 percent urbanized (10 percent in cities with 100,000 or more), and by the mid-1980s, the urban population was more than 70 percent. In the  United States in 1800, only 6 percent of the population lived in towns of 2,500 or more; in 1920 the census reported that for the first time more than half of the American people lived in cities. By the mid-1980s this had risen to nearly 75 percent—about the same as Japan's urban population—and more than two-fifths of the population lived in metropolitan areas of one million or more. Taking the world as a whole, in 1800 no more than 2.5 percent of the population lived in cities of 20,000 or more; by 1965 this had increased to 25 percent, and by 1980 to 40 percent. It is estimated that by the year 2000 about half the world's population will be urban, by this measure. At the same time there has been a great growth of very large cities, of a type virtually unknown in the preindustrial world. Cities of more than one million inhabitants numbered 16 in 1900, 67 in 1950, and 250 in 1985.

As with population growth, it was in the underdeveloped nations that the fastest rates of urban growth were to be found. The rapidly expanding population of a countryside unable to support it sought the city for both escape and opportunity, though in many cases it was a perilous choice. Between 1900 and 1950, while the world's population as a whole grew by 50 percent, the urban population grew by 254 percent; but in Asia urban growth was 444 percent and in Africa 629 percent. By the mid-1980s, Africa and Asia were about 30 percent urbanized, and Latin America nearly 70 percent so. Cities such as São Paulo (15 million), Mexico City (17 million), andCalcutta (10 million), had mushroomed to rival and even overtake in size the large cities of the developed West and Japan.

But while urbanization in the underdeveloped nations repeats some of the more distressing features of its Western counterpart—overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and unemployment—the compensation and eventual remedy of economic growthhas been largely lacking. With some partial exceptions, such as Brazil, Mexico, and Singapore, the underdeveloped world has known urbanization without industrialization. The result has been the rapid growth of shantytowns on the edges of the big cities. It has been estimated that about four or five million families in Latin America live in shantytowns.

Urbanism cannot be understood simply by statistics of urban growth. It is a matter, too, of a distinctive culture and consciousness. Urbanism is a way of life, as classically analyzed by the German sociologist Georg  Simmel and the American sociologist Louis  Wirth. City life, with its tendency to nervous overstimulation, may lead to a bored and blasé attitude to life. It may encourage frivolous and fleeting cults and fashions. It can detach people from their traditional communal moorings, leaving them morally stranded and so inclined to harbour unreal expectations and feverish dreams. In the very number of social contacts it necessarily generates, it may compel individuals to erect barriers to protect their privacy. Individuals may be forced into an attitude of reserve and isolation. Hence, as Simmel noted, the superficial paradox that “one nowhere feels as lonely and lost as in the metropolitan crowd.”

At the same time, cities promote diversity and creativity. They attract the best and the brightest. If anything is to be accomplished in modern society, it almost certainly will be in the city. Karl Marx spoke of “the idiocy of rural life.” Only in cities, many sociologists have felt, are human beings able to realize to the full all their potentialities. Cities are the forcing house of change and growth. “Great cities,” declared the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, “are the uncontested homes of progress; it is in them that ideas, fashions, customs, new needs are elaborated and then spread over the rest of the country. . . . Minds naturally are there oriented to the future.”

But whether they deplored or praised urban life, most commentators have agreed that, with industrialism, the city moved into a pivotal new relation with society as a whole. Preindustrial cities were islands in an agrarian sea. They hailed each other across vast alientracts of nonurban life, which remained largely indifferent to and unaffected by their practices. Essentially they were parasitic on the countryside and on the peasant masses whose agricultural labour sustained them. Their disappearance not only would not have mattered to the peasants but would in most cases have been welcomed.

With industrial urbanism, this relationship was reversed. The countryside now became dependent on the city. It became an integral but peripheral part of a single economic system that was centred on the cities. Largely emptied of people, the countryside was now in effect simply another theatre of industrial operations for city merchants and bankers. Political and economic power resided in the city; industrial and financial corporations became the dominant landowners, replacing individual proprietors. Except in pockets largely maintained as quaint retreats for tourists, rustic life virtually disappeared; certainly it no longer significantly affected the values and practices of the larger society. What remained of “country life” was often little more than a persuasive and nostalgic motif in the handsof advertising copywriters, preying on the fantasies of city dwellers.

The city became both the symbol and the reality of industrial society as a whole. No longer, as in the past, standing in a merely mechanical relation to other parts of society, the city took its place at the centre of an increasingly organic whole. Industrialism created a centralized web of social relationships, and the city was the node. It dictated the style and set the standard for the whole society, imposing on all its own economic, political, and cultural framework.

Work and the family

In preindustrial or nonindustrial society the  family is the basic unit of production. All its members engage in a cooperative set of subsistence activities. In a typical example from early 18th-century  England, the man might be a weaver and his wife a spinner, with the younger children acting as assistants in the joint domestic enterprise. Mixed in with this wage or piece labour would probably be thecultivation of a small plot of land, together with access to common land to forage for fuel and to hunt small game. The family need not necessarily be very large—in northwestern Europe and North America itseems to have been relatively small—but on the whole additional members are an economic asset as the value of extra hands to work outweighs the cost of extra mouths to feed. The family is a collective enterprise; all its members regard themselves as part of that collectivity and their contributions as adding to a common store; servants or other nonfamily members, such as apprentices, are “adopted” or treated as family members, for no other binding personal relationships but family ones are recognized. The family and its members are society in miniature.

Industrialization radically disrupts this more or less autonomous family economy. It takes away the economic function of the family, and reduces it to a unit of consumption and socialization. Production moves away from the household to the factory. The commons are enclosed, and the land commercially exploited for national and international markets. Some individuals become the owners and the managers of the new system. But the bulk of family members must become either landless agricultural labourers or, increasingly, workers in the factories of the new industrial towns. In either case, the family becomes immediately dependent for its livelihood on structures and processes external to itself. It lives by the jobs and wages of its members, and these are affected by forces which it barely comprehends, still less controls.

In the early stages of industrialization, the family will likely struggle to maintain its traditional collective unity. Its members, whether employed as farm workers in the country, industrial workers in the towns, or domestic servants in well-to-do urban homes, continue to pool their resources. They make regular visits home and continue to think of themselves as a collectivity. Their wages still contribute to a common family fund, which is used to support the nonworking young as well as temporarily unemployed members and to provide formembers in sickness and old age. In the absence of a comprehensive system of social security, the family itself continues to fulfill the role. In these circumstances, as in the past, a large family can be as much an asset as a burden. For a considerable time, therefore, large families, especially among the working classes, continue to be the norm in industrializing society.

Eventually the forces of  individualization, whose gross effects on the industrial economy and the society at large are so striking, also affect the family. Its members, male and female, increasingly come to think of their wages as their own, to be disposed of as they individually see fit. This attitude is encouraged by the increasing availability of attractive consumer goods. At some point it becomes economically and politically necessary for the  state to step in to provide for those members unable to earn their own living, either because they are chronically unemployed, or because they are too young, too sick, or too old. The family role thus shrinks further to little more than child-rearing, and even here it has to compete with the school, peer groups, and child-care agencies. For its older members, the family becomes merely the domicile and the locus of recreation and a certain amount of sociability. Its members may spend a good deal of time at home, but their minds are formed more by influences operating outside it. Their lives are led largely outside the family, in their work and in association with nonfamily friends and colleagues. They no longer find their identity within a collective family identity. Hence the tendency of young adults to marry young, to break away from their families of origin, and to set uptheir own independent families.

Shorn of so many traditional functions, the family becomes almost exclusively the sphere of private life. It attends to the needs of children and the emotional and sexual satisfaction of the spouses. A small unit is best suited to these tasks. The  extended families of the preindustrial and early industrial periods, which sometimes included grandparents and married offspring to three or more generations, give way to the small, two-generation  nuclear family of parents and dependent children only. Whether or not the nuclearfamily precedes industrialization—as, for instance, it seems to have done in England—in industrial society it certainly becomes the norm.

With the shrinking and privatization of the family, the importance of  work grows correspondingly. It becomes the principal source of individual identity. In preindustrial society, the question of who one is is likely to be answered in terms of place of origin or family membership: I am John of Winchester, or John, Robert's son. In industrial society the question is typically answered in terms of one's occupation in the formal economy. The occupational role, as miner or machinist, clerk or cleaner, becomes the determining and defining role. It is the source of one's identity, status, and income. Work, throwing off its religious justifications, itself becomes a religion.Not to work, to be unemployed, is to be stigmatized as much in one's own eyes as in the eyes of society.

Work is redefined as applying almost exclusively to formal employment in the industrial economy. All other kinds of work—unpaid domestic work, voluntary work, work done for friends or family, child-rearing—are devalued and treated as marginal or “unproductive.”The paradox is that the elevation of employed work is accompanied by a decisive fragmentation of work as an activity. Industrialization brings about a massive increase in the division of  labour. But this involves not just, as in preindustrial urban life, a specialization of crafts and the rise of new occupations. More significant is a new kind of division of labour, what Adam Smith and Karl Marx called the “detailed” division of labour, in the work task itself. The set of tasks involved in the making of a whole product, which was previously performed by a single artisan or worker, is now broken apart and allocated to a number of different individuals. In his famous example of a pin manufactory, Adam Smith showed how, by dividing the task of pin-making into some 18 distinct operations, each performed by “distinct hands,” productivity could be increased more than a thousandfold. It was this form of the division of labour that became the source of the fantastic productivity of the industrial system, especially once Henry Ford had organized it around the continuously moving assembly line and the American pioneer in scientific management Frederick W. Taylor had supplied an engineering method for the splitting of any task into its simplest operations.

The English social critic John Ruskin pointed to one consequence of this new division of labour when he said that “it is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men.” The problem of motivating the work force, of providing sufficient inducement to work discipline and performance when the tasks themselves were so intrinsically uninteresting, haunted all industrial societies. But thenew division of labour itself pointed, rather ominously, to the likely resolution of this problem. Once tasks had been so minutely subdivided that the least skilled worker could do them, the next step was to mechanize the tasks and dispense with the human worker altogether. Full  automation was in some sense implicit in the principle of the division of labour from the very start. It is ironic that a social process that had in its early stages put work at its very centre should also, in its further evolution, threaten to take it away altogether from its citizens.

songwei1765UID: 202658

Work and the family

In preindustrial or nonindustrial society the  family is the basic unit of production. All its members engage in a cooperative set of subsistence activities. In a typical example from early 18th-century  England, the man might be a weaver and his wife a spinner, with the younger children acting as assistants in the joint domestic enterprise. Mixed in with this wage or piece labour would probably be thecultivation of a small plot of land, together with access to common land to forage for fuel and to hunt small game. The family need not necessarily be very large—in northwestern Europe and North America itseems to have been relatively small—but on the whole additional members are an economic asset as the value of extra hands to work outweighs the cost of extra mouths to feed. The family is a collective enterprise; all its members regard themselves as part of that collectivity and their contributions as adding to a common store; servants or other nonfamily members, such as apprentices, are “adopted” or treated as family members, for no other binding personal relationships but family ones are recognized. The family and its members are society in miniature.

Industrialization radically disrupts this more or less autonomous family economy. It takes away the economic function of the family, and reduces it to a unit of consumption and socialization. Production moves away from the household to the factory. The commons are enclosed, and the land commercially exploited for national and international markets. Some individuals become the owners and the managers of the new system. But the bulk of family members must become either landless agricultural labourers or, increasingly, workers in the factories of the new industrial towns. In either case, the family becomes immediately dependent for its livelihood on structures and processes external to itself. It lives by the jobs and wages of its members, and these are affected by forces which it barely comprehends, still less controls.

In the early stages of industrialization, the family will likely struggle to maintain its traditional collective unity. Its members, whether employed as farm workers in the country, industrial workers in the towns, or domestic servants in well-to-do urban homes, continue to pool their resources. They make regular visits home and continue to think of themselves as a collectivity. Their wages still contribute to a common family fund, which is used to support the nonworking young as well as temporarily unemployed members and to provide formembers in sickness and old age. In the absence of a comprehensive system of social security, the family itself continues to fulfill the role. In these circumstances, as in the past, a large family can be as much an asset as a burden. For a considerable time, therefore, large families, especially among the working classes, continue to be the norm in industrializing society.

Eventually the forces of  individualization, whose gross effects on the industrial economy and the society at large are so striking, also affect the family. Its members, male and female, increasingly come to think of their wages as their own, to be disposed of as they individually see fit. This attitude is encouraged by the increasing availability of attractive consumer goods. At some point it becomes economically and politically necessary for the  state to step in to provide for those members unable to earn their own living, either because they are chronically unemployed, or because they are too young, too sick, or too old. The family role thus shrinks further to little more than child-rearing, and even here it has to compete with the school, peer groups, and child-care agencies. For its older members, the family becomes merely the domicile and the locus of recreation and a certain amount of sociability. Its members may spend a good deal of time at home, but their minds are formed more by influences operating outside it. Their lives are led largely outside the family, in their work and in association with nonfamily friends and colleagues. They no longer find their identity within a collective family identity. Hence the tendency of young adults to marry young, to break away from their families of origin, and to set uptheir own independent families.

Shorn of so many traditional functions, the family becomes almost exclusively the sphere of private life. It attends to the needs of children and the emotional and sexual satisfaction of the spouses. A small unit is best suited to these tasks. The  extended families of the preindustrial and early industrial periods, which sometimes included grandparents and married offspring to three or more generations, give way to the small, two-generation  nuclear family of parents and dependent children only. Whether or not the nuclearfamily precedes industrialization—as, for instance, it seems to have done in England—in industrial society it certainly becomes the norm.

With the shrinking and privatization of the family, the importance of  work grows correspondingly. It becomes the principal source of individual identity. In preindustrial society, the question of who one is is likely to be answered in terms of place of origin or family membership: I am John of Winchester, or John, Robert's son. In industrial society the question is typically answered in terms of one's occupation in the formal economy. The occupational role, as miner or machinist, clerk or cleaner, becomes the determining and defining role. It is the source of one's identity, status, and income. Work, throwing off its religious justifications, itself becomes a religion.Not to work, to be unemployed, is to be stigmatized as much in one's own eyes as in the eyes of society.

Work is redefined as applying almost exclusively to formal employment in the industrial economy. All other kinds of work—unpaid domestic work, voluntary work, work done for friends or family, child-rearing—are devalued and treated as marginal or “unproductive.”The paradox is that the elevation of employed work is accompanied by a decisive fragmentation of work as an activity. Industrialization brings about a massive increase in the division of  labour. But this involves not just, as in preindustrial urban life, a specialization of crafts and the rise of new occupations. More significant is a new kind of division of labour, what Adam Smith and Karl Marx called the “detailed” division of labour, in the work task itself. The set of tasks involved in the making of a whole product, which was previously performed by a single artisan or worker, is now broken apart and allocated to a number of different individuals. In his famous example of a pin manufactory, Adam Smith showed how, by dividing the task of pin-making into some 18 distinct operations, each performed by “distinct hands,” productivity could be increased more than a thousandfold. It was this form of the division of labour that became the source of the fantastic productivity of the industrial system, especially once Henry Ford had organized it around the continuously moving assembly line and the American pioneer in scientific management Frederick W. Taylor had supplied an engineering method for the splitting of any task into its simplest operations.

The English social critic John Ruskin pointed to one consequence of this new division of labour when he said that “it is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men.” The problem of motivating the work force, of providing sufficient inducement to work discipline and performance when the tasks themselves were so intrinsically uninteresting, haunted all industrial societies. But thenew division of labour itself pointed, rather ominously, to the likely resolution of this problem. Once tasks had been so minutely subdivided that the least skilled worker could do them, the next step was to mechanize the tasks and dispense with the human worker altogether. Full  automation was in some sense implicit in the principle of the division of labour from the very start. It is ironic that a social process that had in its early stages put work at its very centre should also, in its further evolution, threaten to take it away altogether from its citizens.

Social structure

Given the importance of economic institutions in general, and of employment in particular, it is not surprising to find that industrial society tends to produce a new principle in the ordering and ranking of individuals.  Economic position and relationships become the key to social position and class membership. This is new, at least in its extent. While wealth or the lack of it were always important in determining social position, they were not usually the sole or even the central determinant. In all nonindustrial societies, attributes of tribal membership, race, religion, age, and gender are of equal and often greater importance in assigning individuals to a position in the social hierarchy. In the traditional Indian caste system, for instance, the religious eminence of even the poorest Brahman marks him out as a member of the highest and most esteemed caste.

Industrial society tends to subordinate all these preindustrial principles of ranking to the economic one. One's position in the system of production or, more generally, in the marketplace assigns one to a particular class or group. Ownership of property, level of education, and type and degree of training all affect one's market position. Karl Marx was convinced that in the course of its development capitalism—the only form of industrialism he considered—would eventually throw up only two main economic classes, the propertyless workers, or proletariat, and the capitalist owners, or bourgeoisie.

One reason why Marx's prediction has not come to pass in any developed society is that, though perhaps dominant in the long run, economic relationships have not so sweepingly eliminated other noneconomic considerations. Older sources of identity have continued to exert considerable power. Groups based on ethnic, religious, and regional ties have overlapped with and occasionally submerged those based solely on the tie of economic interest. Thus, the working class of Northern Ireland has preferred to stress its Protestant identification over its proletarian one. Workers and capitalists in the Basque and Catalan regions of Spain have united in a long, drawn-out opposition to the central government in Madrid. In the United States, racial identity has continued to override any other based on income or occupation.

This is one way in which it is brought home that even radical changes do not necessarily disrupt all continuities. There are gainers and losers in the process of change, and the losers are apt to hark back to past ways and values. Industrialization, while making a fundamental break with earlier forms of society, does not abolish all the elements of traditional society.

Secularization and rationalization

At the most abstract level of analysis, modernization leads to what Max Weber called “the disenchantment of the world.” It eliminates all the superhuman and supernatural forces, the gods and spirits, with which nonindustrial cultures populate the universe and to which they attribute responsibility for the phenomena of the natural and social worlds. In their place it substitutes as the sole cosmology the modern scientific interpretation of nature. Only the laws and regularities discovered by the scientific method are admitted as valid explanations of phenomena. If it rains, or does not rain, it is not because the gods are angry but because of atmospheric conditions, as measured by the barometer and photographed by satellites.

Specifically, modernization involves a process of  secularization; that is, it systematically displaces  religious institutions, beliefs, and practices, substituting for them those of reason and science. This process was first observable in Christian Europe toward the end of the 17th century. (It is possible that there is something inherently secularizing about Christianity, for no other religion seems to give rise spontaneously to secular beliefs.) At any rate, once invented in Europe, especially Protestant Europe, secularization was carried as part of the “package” of industrialism that was exported to the non-European world. Wherever modern European cultures have impinged, they have diffused secularizing currents into traditional religions and nonrational ideologies.

Although secularization is a general tendency or principle of development in modern societies, this does not imply that religion is driven out altogether from society. Against a deep background of tradition, it inevitably leaves many religious practices in place and may even stimulate new ones. Religious rituals, such as Christian baptism and church weddings, persist in all industrial societies; the church may, as in England and Italy, continue to play an important moral and social role. The majority of the population may hold, however insecurely, traditional religious beliefs alongside more scientific ones. There may even be, as in the United States, waves of religious revivalism, involving large sections of the population.

It is nonetheless true that all such religious phenomena, real as they may be in the lives of believers, lose their centrality in the life of the society as a whole. As compared with their place in traditional society, they increasingly take on the character of marginal, even leisure-time, activities. They no longer embody that crucial legitimating power that religious activities have in all nonindustrial societies. The religious establishment is aware that to confront the modern state too openly is to risk disestablishment, as in France, or even, as in communist societies, dissolution. Baptisms and church weddings persist as much for social reasons as from belief in their religious significance.

Secularization is but one manifestation of a larger cultural process that affects all modern societies: the process of  rationalization. While this process is epitomized by the rise of the scientific worldview, it encompasses many more areas than are usually associated with science. It applies, for instance, to the capitalist economy, with its rational organization of labour and its rational calculation of profit and loss. It applies also to artistic developments, such as the rational application of the geometry of perspective in painting and the development of a rational system of notation and rational harmonic principles in music. For Max Weber, the most careful student ofthe process, it referred above all to the establishment of a rational system of laws and administration in modern society. It was in the system of bureaucracy, seen as the impersonal and impartial rule of rationally constituted laws and formal procedures, that Weber sawthe highest development of the rational principle.  Bureaucracy meant a principled hostility to all traditional and “irrational” considerations of person or place, kinship or culture. It expressed the triumph of the scientific method and scientific expertise in social life. The trained official, said Weber, is “the pillar both of the modern state and of the economic life of the West.”

Weber was aware that bureaucracy has two faces. It can also be despotic and irrational in actual operation. The triumph of the principle does not guarantee its strict performance in practice. Rationalization is a process that operates at the highest, most general level of social development. It would be surprising if its effects were to be found in every nook and cranny of modern society. Everywhere one should expect to find the persistence of nonrational and even antirational attitudes and behaviour. Superstition is one example; the occasional rise of personal, charismatic leadership breaking through the rationalized routines of bureaucracy is another. These should not be thought of simply as vestiges of traditional society. They are also the expressions of essential needs, emotional andcultural, that are in danger of being stifled in a scientific and unillusioned environment.

Weber stressed another significant point. Rationalization does not connote that the populations of modern societies are, as individuals, any more reasonable or knowledgeable than those of nonindustrial societies. What it means is that there is, in principle, scientifically validated knowledge available to modern populations, by which they may, if they choose, enlighten themselves about their world and govern their behaviour. In practice, as Weber knew, such knowledge tends to be restricted to scientifically trained elites. The mass of the population of a modern society might in their daily lives be relatively more ignorant than the most primitive savage, for the savage usually has a comprehensive and working knowledge of the tools he uses and the food he consumes, whereas modern man may well use an elevator without the slightest idea of its working principle or eat food manufactured in ways and with materials of which he is totally unaware.

Social problems

As with bureaucracy, so with most other features: they show the two faces of modernity. One is dynamic,forward-looking, progressive, promising unprecedented abundance, freedom, and fulfillment. The other shows the dark side of modernity, the new problems that modernity brings in its wake by virtue of the very scale and novelty of its achievements. Social progress is matched by social pathology.

Thus, the historic achievement of becoming able to feed a large population brings with it crowding, pollution, and environmental destruction. Quiet, privacy, and space become scarce and increasingly treasured commodities. Massed together in cities, seeking rest and recreation, the populations of industrial societies force open the whole world to tourism. Soon every rural haven, every sunswept coast,is turned into an administered holiday camp, each a uniform replica of the rest. The industrial principle ofmass production and distribution can readily be turned from the production of goods to that of services, including those of leisure and entertainment.

Urban-industrial life offers unprecedented opportunities for individual mobility and personal freedom. It also promises the attainment of dazzling prizes, in wealth and honours, for those with the enterprise and talent to reach for them. The other side of the coin is the loneliness of the city dweller and the desolation of failure for those many who cannot win any of the prizes. As Durkheim analyzed it, the individual is placed in the pathological condition of  anomie. He experiences “the malady of infinite aspirations.” The decline of religion and community removes the traditional restraints on appetite, allowing it to grow morbidly and without limit. At the same time the competitive modern order that stimulates these unreal expectations provides insufficient and unequal means for their realization. The result is an increase in suicide, crime, and mental disorder.

Industrial  work, too, exacts a high price for the enormous increase in productivity brought about by the intensified division of labour. Karl  Marx offered the most systematic analysis of this price under the heading of “ alienation.” The industrial worker feels estranged from the activity of work because his task is so fragmented, undemanding, and meaningless. He does not realize himself, his human potential, in his work. Unlike traditional craft work, for instance, it does not call on his constructive and creative faculties. The industrial worker also feels alienated from the product of his work, for he has no control over its manufacture, nor over the terms and conditions of its disposal. As the dynamic sum of its parts, the industrial system of production is phenomenally powerful; but this power is achieved at the cost of reducing one class of those parts, the human workers, to mere “hands,” mere semblances of humanity. Eventually, Marx hoped, the surplus wealth produced by the industrial system would free workers altogether from the necessity of work; but until that time the degraded condition of the worker would be the most eloquent testimony to the dehumanization wroughtby the system.

Marx's optimism about the future was perhaps as excessive as his pessimism about his present. But he was by no means the only one who felt that industrial society demanded too high a price of many of its members. Repeatedly, industrialism was found to have created new and apparently ineradicable pockets of poverty. Despite steady economic growth, it was the persistent finding throughout the industrial world that between 15 and 20 percent of the population remained permanently below officially defined levels of  poverty. It appeared that industrialism by its very mechanism of growth created a “new poor,” who for whatever reason—deprived backgrounds, low enterprise, low intelligence—were unable to compete according to the rules of the industrial order. The communal and kinship supports of the past having withered away, there was no alternative for the failed and the rejected but to become claimants and pensioners of the state.

There were other victims, too. The small  nuclear family offered, to a greater extent than ever before, the opportunity for intense privacy and emotional fulfillment. But the very intensity of these relationships seemed to put an intolerable burden on it. Added to that, the family survived as the only remaining primary group in society, the only social unit where relationships remained primarily personal and face-to-face. Elsewhere bureaucratic or commercial relationships prevailed. The nuclear family was called upon to do all the work of restoration and repair of its members on their return from the impersonal, large-scale, bureaucratic world of work and, increasingly, play. Under this unprecedented pressure it began to show all the classic symptoms of distress. Adolescent alienation and teenage rebellion became accepted features of modern family life.  Divorce rates soared; and when people sought to remarry—“the triumph of hope over experience”—their second  marriages proved even less stable than their first. There was a steady increase in the incidence of one-parent families, usually headed by a woman.

Modernization, finally, put a number of new political and cultural problems on the agenda. The decline of local communities, and the great growth in the scale of all social institutions and especially the acceleration of political centralization, put a strain on civic loyalties and the willingness of people to participate in political life. As mass political parties came to monopolize civic life, individual citizens retreated increasingly into private life. Political apathy and low turnouts at elections became matters of serious concern, calling into question the democratic claims of modern liberal societies. A similar concern centred on the spread of mass communications, which inthe 20th century came to dominate the cultural life of modern societies. The uniformity and conformity bred by the press, radio, and television threatened—albeit passively rather than directly—the  pluralism and diversity on which liberal society prided itself and which it regarded as its chief security against totalitarian challenge.

Together, political and cultural centralization and uniformity were interpreted as evidence of the creation of a “mass society.” Tocqueville had warned that individuals lacking strong intermediate institutions with which to identify would become atomized and in their anonymity and powerlessness might look to the protection of strong men and strong governments. Once more, this outcome hadto be seen as a possibility, not an inevitability. Pluralism remained strong in many societies. But the rise and success of totalitarian movements in some industrial societies showed that the tendencies were real and suggested that they were present in some degree in all modern societies.

songwei1765UID: 202658

Modern society and world society
Western and non-Western routes to modernity

The Western experience of industrialization was the model for world industrialization. To become modernwas to become something like Western industrial society. Non-Western societies were not always given much choice in the matter. As formal colonies or informal clients of Western powers, they often found themselves being “developed” in a Western direction before they were permitted to take political controlof their own destinies. Once on the way, there was no turning back. But, even where an element of choice existed, it remained the consensus that the only viable form of society in the modern world was industrial society. Only industrial societies could be active agents in the world system. All others must remain clients or dependents.  Japan demonstrated this better than any other nation. From a poor nationhumiliated at the hands of the West in the mid-19th century, Japan rose through industrialization to become one of the most powerful societies in the world. More pointedly, Japan showed that, by meeting the challenge of industrialization, a non-Western society could become not merely the equal but the superior of some of the strongest Western powers.

Japan confirmed what Western experience had already made clear: There are several routes to modernity. In the 19th century Britain, Belgium, France, and the United States industrialized largely on the basis of the individual entrepreneur and the free market economy. In Germany, and even more in Japan, the state and political elites played a major role, organizing credit, coordinating and planning development, and restricting foreign access to home markets in the interests of native industry. Later still came the even more centralized authoritarian model of modernization under the aegis of the one-party state. Taking their lead from the Soviet  Union following the Russian Revolution of 1917, many developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America sought to industrialize according to economic plans drawn up by political elites and stringently imposed on their populations. Even where, as in India, formal liberal democracy was instituted, industrialization was largely guided by a single national party—usually the one identified with the struggle for independence from colonial rule, as was the Indian National Congress party. In any case, there were plenty of socialisms to choose from. There were the African socialisms of Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana and Julius Nyerere's Tanzania, the Chinese socialism of MaoZedong, the Cuban socialism of Fidel Castro, or the Yugoslav socialism of Josip Broz Tito. All could aspire to be models of development toThird World societies.

Japan and the Soviet Union (until its dissolution in 1991) suggested, in their different ways, that there was a general pattern of late development appropriate to all those nations that attempted to industrialize in the shadow of already formidable industrial powers. This pattern variously involved strong protectionism, directed labour, control of unions, and central supervision of banking and credit. It also meant circumventing the sharp division between management and workers that hampered most early Western industrializers and that continued to worry them in their later industrial history. Above all, late developers put the power of the  state at the centre of the modernizing effort. The state was the prime mover and guardian of the whole enterprise. Unlike Britain or the United States, wherethe state—at any rate in the early stage—encouraged development more or less passively, keeping the peace and enforcing the laws and perhaps arranging for some free land (as for the railroads in the United States), in countries such as Japan, the former Soviet Union, and China the state directed the industrializing process from the start and supervised it closely throughout. The state made themajor decisions about investment, transport and communications, and education. It developed the media of mass communications asagencies of mass socialization. Therefore, whether or not the economy was formally nationalized, in practice economic development was placed firmly under national auspices and directed to nationalist ends.

Western and non-Western routes to modernity

The Western experience of industrialization was the model for world industrialization. To become modernwas to become something like Western industrial society. Non-Western societies were not always given much choice in the matter. As formal colonies or informal clients of Western powers, they often found themselves being “developed” in a Western direction before they were permitted to take political controlof their own destinies. Once on the way, there was no turning back. But, even where an element of choice existed, it remained the consensus that the only viable form of society in the modern world was industrial society. Only industrial societies could be active agents in the world system. All others must remain clients or dependents.  Japan demonstrated this better than any other nation. From a poor nationhumiliated at the hands of the West in the mid-19th century, Japan rose through industrialization to become one of the most powerful societies in the world. More pointedly, Japan showed that, by meeting the challenge of industrialization, a non-Western society could become not merely the equal but the superior of some of the strongest Western powers.

Japan confirmed what Western experience had already made clear: There are several routes to modernity. In the 19th century Britain, Belgium, France, and the United States industrialized largely on the basis of the individual entrepreneur and the free market economy. In Germany, and even more in Japan, the state and political elites played a major role, organizing credit, coordinating and planning development, and restricting foreign access to home markets in the interests of native industry. Later still came the even more centralized authoritarian model of modernization under the aegis of the one-party state. Taking their lead from the Soviet  Union following the Russian Revolution of 1917, many developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America sought to industrialize according to economic plans drawn up by political elites and stringently imposed on their populations. Even where, as in India, formal liberal democracy was instituted, industrialization was largely guided by a single national party—usually the one identified with the struggle for independence from colonial rule, as was the Indian National Congress party. In any case, there were plenty of socialisms to choose from. There were the African socialisms of Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana and Julius Nyerere's Tanzania, the Chinese socialism of MaoZedong, the Cuban socialism of Fidel Castro, or the Yugoslav socialism of Josip Broz Tito. All could aspire to be models of development toThird World societies.

Japan and the Soviet Union (until its dissolution in 1991) suggested, in their different ways, that there was a general pattern of late development appropriate to all those nations that attempted to industrialize in the shadow of already formidable industrial powers. This pattern variously involved strong protectionism, directed labour, control of unions, and central supervision of banking and credit. It also meant circumventing the sharp division between management and workers that hampered most early Western industrializers and that continued to worry them in their later industrial history. Above all, late developers put the power of the  state at the centre of the modernizing effort. The state was the prime mover and guardian of the whole enterprise. Unlike Britain or the United States, wherethe state—at any rate in the early stage—encouraged development more or less passively, keeping the peace and enforcing the laws and perhaps arranging for some free land (as for the railroads in the United States), in countries such as Japan, the former Soviet Union, and China the state directed the industrializing process from the start and supervised it closely throughout. The state made themajor decisions about investment, transport and communications, and education. It developed the media of mass communications asagencies of mass socialization. Therefore, whether or not the economy was formally nationalized, in practice economic development was placed firmly under national auspices and directed to nationalist ends.

One world or many

Japan has been, so far, the only non-Western country in the world to become fully industrialized. It may be significant that it began its industrialization in the 19th century, while the West was still itself industrializing and before it had built up a truly commanding lead. The same is true of Russia, the only other major case of industrialization outside western Europe and North America (taking South Africa and Australia as “European”). In the 20th century it has become increasingly clear that industrialization is not something that nations can decide to do or how to do entirely by themselves. They operate within a context of world industrialization, in a world system of states of decidedly unequal wealth and power.

Throughout most of the 20th century the nations of this world system were categorized according to political or economic criteria. Applying the former resulted in the familiar “West–East” divide. This was primarily an ideological division between the developed capitalist nations, such as the United States, Germany, and Japan (counted ideologically as Western), and the developed communist or state-socialist nations, such as the countries of the former East European bloc. Attached to these were, respectively, underdeveloped capitalist nations, such as Bolivia and Bangladesh, and underdeveloped communist nations, such as China and Cuba. The West–East distinction became obsolete in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and of communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe.

A more significant and in many ways more interesting division arises from placing primary emphasis on the level of economic development, with political or ideological differences as subsidiary matters. This approach yields the “North–South” divide. With some anomalies—South Africa, Australia—the world is seen as divided essentially between the wealthy and powerful countries of the Northern Hemisphere and the poor, less-developed countries of the Southern Hemisphere. But the North–South dichotomy, though useful in debate, is inaccurate and misleading. A more precise economic model of the world system distinguishes among the superpowers, solely the United States at the end of the 20th century; other developed countries, such as Japan, Germany, and Britain; and the underdeveloped countries, such as China and Bolivia. We then have First, Second, and Third Worlds.

For most of the 20th century, when the U.S.S.R. was still a superpower, this model illustrated the interconnections and flow of power in the world system. It showed the global dominance of the superpowers, which, despite their usually conflicting ideological and strategicinterests, shared a common interest in maintaining their world political and economic leadership. In competing with each other, the superpowers drew into their respective spheres of influence the less powerful countries of the Second and Third Worlds; but, in order to maintain the balance of power, they could in effect collude, choosing on occasion to ignore opportunities to gain at each other's expense in order to stifle political movements that sought too independent a third way.

A further refinement of the economic model looks past the level of three worlds of development to a single underlying and developing world system. Based on a historical perspective, this view, advanced especially by the American theorist Immanuel Wallerstein (b. 1930), argues that there is but a single world economy, the capitalist world economy, which has been expanding since the 17th century. This economy has, over the centuries, been expanding outward from its northwestern European base to take in an increasingly large portion of the globe. Even under the communist regimes, the Eastern European societies were seen as full participants in this system and were accordingly regarded not as aberrant socialist economies but as “collective capitalist firms.” In this model, countries are classified according to their nearness to the centre of the system. There are “core countries,” such as the United States and Japan; “semi-peripheral countries,” such as Brazil, most eastern European states, and China; and “peripheral countries,” such as Cuba and most of the poor countries of Africa and Asia. Depending on economic fortunes and fluctuations, as well as the logic of the developing system itself, countries can move in and out of these categories.

The plausibility and appeal of this model lie in its recognition of the growing internationalization of the industrial economy. Nation-states, whether capitalist or communist, are becoming increasingly subordinate to world economic developments. The politics of energy—oil, gas, nuclear power—are world politics (just as, for some considerable time, military strategy has been world strategy). Decisions about capital investment and growth are made in a world context and on a global scale. The giant  multinational corporations are the most significant new actors on the world stage. They have been establishing a new international division of labour. From their point of view, it makes more sense to manufacture goods in South Korea or Taiwan, where labour is still cheap and governments compliant, than in the United States or Britain, where labour is expensive and regulation stringent. Such high-level functions as central planning and research and development can be retained in their Western homelands, where there are the necessary reserves of highly trained professional and scientific personnel. Profits can be declared in those countries where taxes are lowest. In such a way do the multinationals illustrate, even embody, the interdependence of core and periphery nations.

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Postmodern and postindustrial society

New developments in economic and social structure

Industrialism, at least within our experience of it for more than 200 years, never reaches a point of equilibrium or a level plateau. By its very principle of operation, it ceaselessly innovates and changes. Having largely eliminated the agricultural  work force, it moves on manufacturing employment by creating new automated technology that increases manufacturing productivity while displacing workers.  Manufacturing, from accounting for a half or more of the employed population of industrial societies, shrinks to between a quarter and a third. Its place is filled by the  service sector, which in fully industrial societies comes to employ between a half and two-thirds of the work force and to account for more than half of the gross national product. Most service occupations—in government, health, education, finance, leisure and entertainment—are white-collar. The typical industrial worker is now not the blue-collar worker but the white-collar worker.

The move to a service society is marked by a great expansion in education, health, and other private and public welfare services. The population typically becomes not just healthier, better housed, and better fed but also better educated. Most young people complete secondary- or high-school  education; between a quarter and a half of them go on to full-time higher education. Professional and scientific knowledge becomes the most marketable commodity. The “knowledge class” of professional, scientific, and technical workers becomes the fastest-growing occupational group. The link between pure science and technology, loose and uncertain in the early stages of industrialization, becomes pivotal. New industries, starting with chemicals and pharmaceuticals and later including the aeronautical, space, and nuclear industries, are created by developments in pure science and depend largely on theoretical research. Theoretical knowledge in the social sciences also comes to be widely applied, as in Keynesian management of the national economy and in complex models of technological and economic forecasting.

Struck by these changes, as compared with the classic forms of industrial society of the 19th and early 20th centuries, some theorists,notably the American sociologist Daniel Bell, have discerned a movement to a new postmodern or postindustrial society. Such conclusions may be premature. Most of the changes characterizing late industrialism can be seen as the results of long-term developments implicit in the process of industrialization from the start. The rise of service industries has emerged in part from the increase in leisure and in disposable wealth and in part from the continuing process of mechanization and technical innovation, which constantly raises manufacturing productivity by replacing human labour with machines. It can also be seen as the consequence of thegrowth of multinational corporations; this, too, is the result of the increase in scale and complexity of industrial organization, a clear tendency from the very start. The growth of knowledge-based industries, finally, represents no break with the past. Science has alwaysbeen at the base of industrialism, and its closer union with industry and society in the 20th century is simply the fulfillment of modernization's rationalizing drive.

But, while there may be no new society, these changes do add a new dimension to modern societies. Beyond a certain point in economic development, new values and problems emerge. The activities of the multinationals seem to encourage a process of “de-industrialization” in many modern societies, a drastic decline in manufacturing output and employment as these functions shift tothe Third World. While services have for the time being filled the breach, it cannot be assumed that such a balancing will continue, at least as far as employment is concerned. The new microelectronic technology, itself simply the latest wave of industrial tools, has madeinroads into service employment faster than more traditional industrial machines displaced manufacturing workers. The application of computers to information processing in a wide range of service work may threaten in turn to displace the vast mass of routine white-collar workers. Nor are the jobs of the more skilled workers necessarily much safer: Computer-aided design may take over much of the draftsman's and architect's work as computer-aided manufacturing equipment displaces skilled machinists; electronic audiovisual equipment may to a large extent take the place of the classroom teacher; and self-service diagnostic software may eliminate many tasks of the nurse and doctor.


New developments in economic and social structure

Industrialism, at least within our experience of it for more than 200 years, never reaches a point of equilibrium or a level plateau. By its very principle of operation, it ceaselessly innovates and changes. Having largely eliminated the agricultural  work force, it moves on manufacturing employment by creating new automated technology that increases manufacturing productivity while displacing workers.  Manufacturing, from accounting for a half or more of the employed population of industrial societies, shrinks to between a quarter and a third. Its place is filled by the  service sector, which in fully industrial societies comes to employ between a half and two-thirds of the work force and to account for more than half of the gross national product. Most service occupations—in government, health, education, finance, leisure and entertainment—are white-collar. The typical industrial worker is now not the blue-collar worker but the white-collar worker.

The move to a service society is marked by a great expansion in education, health, and other private and public welfare services. The population typically becomes not just healthier, better housed, and better fed but also better educated. Most young people complete secondary- or high-school  education; between a quarter and a half of them go on to full-time higher education. Professional and scientific knowledge becomes the most marketable commodity. The “knowledge class” of professional, scientific, and technical workers becomes the fastest-growing occupational group. The link between pure science and technology, loose and uncertain in the early stages of industrialization, becomes pivotal. New industries, starting with chemicals and pharmaceuticals and later including the aeronautical, space, and nuclear industries, are created by developments in pure science and depend largely on theoretical research. Theoretical knowledge in the social sciences also comes to be widely applied, as in Keynesian management of the national economy and in complex models of technological and economic forecasting.

Struck by these changes, as compared with the classic forms of industrial society of the 19th and early 20th centuries, some theorists,notably the American sociologist Daniel Bell, have discerned a movement to a new postmodern or postindustrial society. Such conclusions may be premature. Most of the changes characterizing late industrialism can be seen as the results of long-term developments implicit in the process of industrialization from the start. The rise of service industries has emerged in part from the increase in leisure and in disposable wealth and in part from the continuing process of mechanization and technical innovation, which constantly raises manufacturing productivity by replacing human labour with machines. It can also be seen as the consequence of thegrowth of multinational corporations; this, too, is the result of the increase in scale and complexity of industrial organization, a clear tendency from the very start. The growth of knowledge-based industries, finally, represents no break with the past. Science has alwaysbeen at the base of industrialism, and its closer union with industry and society in the 20th century is simply the fulfillment of modernization's rationalizing drive.

But, while there may be no new society, these changes do add a new dimension to modern societies. Beyond a certain point in economic development, new values and problems emerge. The activities of the multinationals seem to encourage a process of “de-industrialization” in many modern societies, a drastic decline in manufacturing output and employment as these functions shift tothe Third World. While services have for the time being filled the breach, it cannot be assumed that such a balancing will continue, at least as far as employment is concerned. The new microelectronic technology, itself simply the latest wave of industrial tools, has madeinroads into service employment faster than more traditional industrial machines displaced manufacturing workers. The application of computers to information processing in a wide range of service work may threaten in turn to displace the vast mass of routine white-collar workers. Nor are the jobs of the more skilled workers necessarily much safer: Computer-aided design may take over much of the draftsman's and architect's work as computer-aided manufacturing equipment displaces skilled machinists; electronic audiovisual equipment may to a large extent take the place of the classroom teacher; and self-service diagnostic software may eliminate many tasks of the nurse and doctor.

New patterns of urban life

Many features of modernity, intensified beyond a certain level, produce a reactive response.  Urbanization, having reached some practical saturation point, leads to suburbanization, the desire to livein neighbourhoods with green spaces and at least a breath of country air. As the suburbs fill up, the more prosperous citizens become exurban: they colonize the villages and small towns of the countrysidewithin commuting distance of their work in the city. Aiding this trend is the industrial decentralization and depopulation of many  cities as old manufacturing industries decline and new service industries move out to the suburbs and small towns. For the first time since the onset of industrialization, the countryside begins to gain population and the cities begin to lose it. According to the 1980 U.S. census, cities such as St. Louis, Buffalo, and Detroit lost between 35 and 47 percent of their populations over a 30-year period. London lost almost 15 percent of the population of its inner boroughs between 1961 and1971, and Liverpool almost 25 percent of its population in the 20-year period to 1971.

But there is a deceptive aspect to this movement. The familiar forces of industrialism, here as elsewhere, continue to dominate the process. Suburbanization and exurbanization do not mean deurbanization. On the contrary, they amount to a spreading of urban life over greater and greater areas. They are simply the filling up, at lesser but still urban densities, of larger areas and regions. From the old city develops the  metropolitan area, comprising a large city of about 10 million people together with a surrounding community socially and economically dependent on it. The metropolitan areas themselves tend to merge into even larger urban agglomerations, the megalopolises, which serve populations of 40 million or more. The biggest of these is “Boswash,” the chain of contiguous cities and surrounding regions that stretches from Boston to Washington, D.C., along the northeastern seaboard of the United States. Others in the United States include the Chicago–Pittsburgh area around the Great Lakes and the San Francisco–San Diego region along the California coast. There are emerging megalopolises in Britain in the region between London and the Midland cities, in Germany in the industrial basin of the Ruhr, and in Japan in the Tokyo–Osaka–Kyōto complex.

The Greek architect and city planner Constantinos Apostolos Doxiadis argued that this process is part of a long-term evolution that must eventually culminate in the world-city, or “Ecumenopolis.” This remarkable object will incorporate areas reserved for recreation and agriculture as well as desert and wilderness conservation areas, but essentially it will be a web of interconnected cities throughout the world, all closely linked by rapid transport and electronic communication, and all contributing to a single functional unity. In Ecumenopolis the entire land surface of the globe will have become recognizably the dwelling place of urbanized humanity.

Embedded in this process is a contradictory pattern typical of late industrial life. Subjectively, individuals wish to escape from the city. They leave the congested and declining older urban centres only to find themselves cocooned by larger urban structures in the regionat large. The objective structural forces of industrialism have in no way abated. But increasingly they give rise to reactions and behaviour that have a de-modernizing character.

Thus there is reaction against large-scale bureaucratic organization. “Small is beautiful,” declare the protesters as they seek to reestablish communal and craft environments characteristic of the preindustrial period. Parallel with this is a movement to promote “alternative” and “intermediate” technology, which aims to design tools that restore to the human worker the potential to use and express skill and creativity.

At the political level, too, there is reaction against large scale and centralization. In many industrial societies, such as those of Britain, France, and Canada, there have been strong regional movements demanding autonomy or outright independence. Often these are areas, such as Scotland in Britain, where at least substantial minorities wish to restore historic nations that have been incorporated intolarger, more centralized states. Such movements derive momentum from the internationalization of the world economy and polity, which, over the world generally, gives rise to wholly new  nationalisms as well. Lacking economic and often genuine political self-government, small societies assert their cultural identity and clamour—and sometimes fight—for autonomy. This was particularly evident in the 1990s with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and other nationalist movements in Africa and throughout the world. In less extreme cases, new nations may emerge, although their main symbols of independence may be no more than a national anthem and an international airport.

The assertion of cultural values opposed to modernity is a general characteristic of late industrialism. This may take the form of a revival of  ethnicity, a claim for a culture and way of life that often harks back to older communal traditions and which denies the legitimacy of any uniform culture propagated by the large nation-state. Thus in the United States blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, and many other groups have made strong claims on behalf of a distinctive ethnic way of life that they variously seek to defend against the encroachments of the national culture. Protests against rationality and uniformity are seen, as well, in the successive waves of youth cultures and religious revivals that have marked late industrial society. Objectively, it is clear that the large-scale bureaucratic institutions of society continue to give the main direction to national life. All revolts break against their indispensability to modern society. But subjectively these institutions are incapable of satisfying the emotional and social needs of individuals. The consequence isthe repeated rise of subcultures, often of bizarre mystical or hedonistic kinds, which aim in their practice to reverse the main features of modernity and which give their members a sense of participation and belonging of an almost tribal nature. Central to most of these antinomian movements and ideologies is a wholesale rejection of the scientific worldview, which is depicted as alienating and dehumanizing.

To embark on modernization is to be caught up in a whirligig. Once started, the ceaselessly spinning motion seemingly cannot be stopped or even slowed for long. A nation that modernizes is set upon a path of development that carries its own logic and an inseparable mixture of good and bad. Without question, modern society brings progress in the form of material abundance. Less certainly, it brings increasing control of the natural and social environment. But its scientific and technological achievements are bought at some cost to spiritual and emotional life. In unifying the world, modernization establishes uniform standards, albeit higher ones in many cases than previously prevailed. At the same time, it ensures that failures and disasters will also be magnified globally. There are no retreats and escape routes, except those that modern society itself invents as pastimes. The world becomes one and its fate that of all its inhabitants.

To measure the balance of gains and losses in modernity and to increase the former against the latter require forms of social accounting and social engineering that have so far largely defied the efforts of social science and government. But in practice this doesnot matter. No one can wait for that problem to be solved, if it ever can be. To modernize is to take everything, the bad with the good, and not to modernize is to play no part in the life of contemporary humanity. One of the unusual, and historically unprecedented, aspects of modernization is that it leaves no choice in the matter.

songwei1765UID: 202658

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For example: （英）favour=（美）favor

davidjackyUID: 135962

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Nikita56cnUID: 2104632

逗逗UID: 173558

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staralwaysUID: 193479

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AlexandraUID: 185174

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