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Theories of Industrial Society: reflections on the recrudescence of historicism and the future of futurology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

John H. Goldthorpe
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European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , November 1971 , pp. 263 - 288
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Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1971

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References

* Kerr, Clark et al. , Industrialism and Industrial Man2 (London, Heinemann, 1962)Google Scholar; Id. Marshall, Marx and Modem Times: the multidimensional society (Cambridge, Cambridge U. P., 1968)Google Scholar; Parsons, Talcott, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1966)Google Scholar; Id. Evolutionary Universals in Society, American Sociological Review, XXIX (1964), 339–357.

(1) The Poverty of Historicism, Economica, XI (1944), 86–103, 119, 137Google Scholar; XII (1945), 69–89; subsequently republished in book form (London 1957). All subsequent references are to this latter, revised version.

(2) Much of this being due to disagreement with other of Popper's arguments—eg. regarding “methodological individualism” or “piecemeal social engineering”—closely, but by no means inseparably, linked to his rejection of historicism.

** Ossip Flechtheim, Futurology, the New Science of Probability, repr. in History and Futurology (Meisenheim-am-Glan, Anton Hain 1966); de Jouvenel, Bertrand (ed.), L'art de la conjecture, transl. as The Art of Conjecture (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1967)Google Scholar; Kahn, Herman and Wiener, Anthony J., The Year 2000: a framework for speculation on the next thirty-three years (New York, Collier-Macmillan, 1967)Google Scholar; Young, Michael (ed.), Forecasting and the Social Sciences (London, Heinemann, 1968)Google Scholar; Jungk, Robert and Galtung, Johan (eds), Mankind 2000 (Oslo/London, Allen and Unwin, 1969)Google Scholar.

(3) The Poverty of Historicism, p. 3, emphasis in original.

(4) Ibid. pp. 12–14, 49–52.

(5) Ibid. p. 49.

(6) Cf.Weber, Max, Politics as a Vocation, in Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright (eds), Essays in Sociology (London 1948)Google Scholar; and also the papers brought together in Shils, E. A. and Finch, H. A. (eds), The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe 1949)Google Scholar; Hayek, F. von, The Counter-Revolution of Science (Glencoe 1952)Google Scholar and The Constitution of Liberty (London 1960)Google Scholar; and, post-Popper, Berlin, Isaiah, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford 1969)Google Scholar.

(7) It may also be observed that the new liberalism is largely of American inspiration, while the old was essentially European. American social thought, incidentally, offers a much earlier example of an attempt to combine elements from Spencer and Marx; namely that of W. G. Sumner.

(8) Cf.Aron, Raymond, Dix-huit leçons sur la socété industrielle (Paris 1962)Google Scholar; La lutte des classes (Paris 1964)Google Scholar. These books originated in lectures given at the Sorbonne and were first published in 1955–1956 in Les Cours de Sorbonne. It is important to add that Aron was at the same time concernlution ed to emphasise the crucial differences between eastern and western industrial societies in their political institutions, and that, unlike later liberal theorists of industrialism, envisaged no particular propensity for these differences to diminish. Cf. his Démocratie et totalitarianisme (Paris 1965)Google Scholar.

(9) Rostow, W. W., The Stages of Ecoa nomic Growth (Cambridge 1960)Google Scholar. The significant sub-title is “A non-Communist Manifesto”.

(10) For a fairly comprehensive discussion by a group of British sociologists, see Halmos, P. (ed.) The Development of Industrial Societies (Keele 1964)Google Scholar.

(11) See, e.g., Bellah, Robert N., Religious Evolution, American Sociological Review, XXIX (1964), 358–374CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “What I mean by evolution, then, is nothing metaphysocial but the simple empirical generalisation that more complex forms develop from less complex forms and that the properties and possibilities of more complex forms differ from those of less complex forms”. Cf. also S. N. EISENSTADT, Social Change, Differentiation and Evolution, Ibid. 375–386. A similarly innocuous objective seems to be usually that of writers who eschew the idea of evolution but emphasise the importance of a ‘developmental’ perspective. Cf. Dunning, Eric, The Concept of Development: two illustrative case studies, in Rose, Peter I. (ed.), The Study of Society (New York 1967)Google Scholar. In all such cases, I would argue, the propositions advanced are chiefly of value in posing sociological problems—how are the regularities demonsical strated to be explained? The propositions themselves are not of a kind that could have theoretical—i.e. explanatory—significance, Cf. the distinction stressed by Gellner, in discussing evolutionary theory, between “the tracing of the Path”, through the description of its successive stages, and its explanation, which requires an account of the forces and processes whereby its course was determined: Gellner, Ernest, Thought and Change (London 1964), pp. 17–18Google Scholar.

(12) See Kerr, , Industrialism…, op. cit. pp. 33–34, 46Google Scholar.

(13) Kerr, , Industrialism..., op. cit. pp. 22–23Google Scholar.

(14) Ibid. Introduction, p. 12.

(15) Ibid. ch. III–V esp.

(16) Ibid.ch. X.

(17) Ibid. ch. 11, x. See also Kerr's most recent statement of his position, Marshall, Marx and Modern Times, op. cit. ch. vii and x especially. Kerr still maintains that “the realistic alternative as industrialism evolves is some form of pluralism”. He recognises more explicitly than before that a number of different kinds of pluralism are conceivable—including ‘co-ordinated’ pluralism on, say, the Yugoslav pattern or even ‘syndicalist’ pluralism; but in “the coming struggle for power” between proponents of these divergent systems, Kerr adheres to the view that history is on the side of the liberal model. In other words, his position is basically unaltered: the realistic choices are steadily narrowing down in favour of the ‘free choice’ society.

(18) Industrialism…, op. cit. p. 288.

(19) Ibid. pp. 282–283. For the notion of the ‘inner-society’, see Marshall, Marx and Modern Times, op. cit. ch. VIII.

(20) Cf. the remarks made by Berlin on such apparently ‘soft’ determinism to the effect that it is “simply a variant of the general determinist thesis”, in Four Essays on Liberty, Introduction, pp. XIII et sqq.

(21) See Marshall, Marx and Modern Times, pp. 60–71, 122–123. As regards syndicalism, it is interesting to note that in Industrialism and Industrial Man this was consigned to the dust-bin of history, along with communalism and co-copersysativism, as an ideology which had already “almost completely disappeared from the scene” (p. 282). But in the more recent work, syndicalism is re-instated—without reference to the previous judgment—as “the essential challenge to the status quo” (p. 123) and indeed, as indicated, is accorded some limited historic role.

(22) It may be noted that Parsons is expressly concerned to disassociate his own approach from that of ‘historicism’ in the German, ‘anti-naturalistic’ tradition of Hegel and Marx or, later, Dilthey. These writers, Parsons stresses, specifically deny what he would wish to maintain: namely, the possibility and relevance of “generalised analytical theory (which sytematically treats the interdependence of independently variable factors) in explaining temporally sequential socio-cultural phework, nomena”: (Societies, op. cit. p. 115, emphasis in original). However, as Popper has argued, there are important similarities, as well as differences, between the tradition in question and ‘pronaturalistic’ attempts at interpreting history in terms of some version of evolutionism.

(23) Ibid. p. 109.

(24) Ibid. pp. 109–110, emphasis in original.

(25) Evolutionary Universals in Society, loc. cit., pp. 340–341.

(26) See Societies, p. 110.

(27) For far more detailed arguments to show the fundamental similarities—and related difficulties—shared by Parsons' evolutionism and that of nineteenth century writers, see Nisbet, Robert A., Social Change and History (New York 1969), pp. 223–239, 258–267Google Scholar.

(28) A third is “a generalised universalistic legal system”.

(29) Evolutionary Universals, p. 349.

(30) See Evolutionary Universals, p. 350. In regard to relatively advanced societies, Parsons appears, not surprisingly, to drop the alternative ultimate possibilities of ‘elimination’ or ‘niche’ existence, although ‘regression’—to an unspecified degree—may occur.

(31) Ibid. p. 353. For Parsons' notion of ‘pluralisation’, see his essay, Some Comments on the Sociology of Marx, Karl, in Sociological Theory and Modern Society (New York 1967)Google Scholar. It may also be noted how, in discussing the development of advanced societies, Parsons again comes close to Kerr in the importance that he attaches to technological and economic exigencies in determining institutional forms—despite the view he has expressed that the broad patterns of social evolution are governed at the highest level by cultural rather than material factors. See Societies, pp. 112–114. The explanation would appear to be that Parsons regards the setting of a paramount value on economic productivity as virtually a constant within the ‘modernising’ process. See, for instance, his essay, Polarization of the World and International Order, in the collection cited above.

(32) Evolutionary Universals, pp. 355–356, emphasis in original.

(33) Ibid. p. 356.

(34) Cf. also Polarization of the World and International Order, p. 486 esp.

(35) For example, true to his marxisant method, Kerr stresses in this respect the role of the new class of “non-revolutionary intellectuals”—especially, the scientists, technologists and managers. In contradiction with the official ideology which calls for great centralisation of political power, the latter groups increasingly demand a share in decision making, and the development of the “forces of production” increasingly puts de facto power into their hands. For Parsons, on the other hand, the major potential for change is to be found in the functional imperative, within a large-scale and complex society, for the political leadership to entrust the increasingly educated mass with some share in political responsibility—this being a condition of both the efficiency and legitimacy of the political system.

(36) For example: Rostow, Walter W. claims that Communism is merely “a disease of the transition” (to industrialism) and cannot survive the age of “high mass consumption”, The Stages of Economic Growth, pp. 162–164Google Scholar. Gabriel ALMOND takes the ‘Anglo-American’ political system as a paradigm of political modernity, and uses ‘modern Western’ and ‘Western democratic’ as virtually synonymous descriptions of political institutions: ‘Introduction’, in Almond, Gabriel A. and Coleman, James S., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton 1960)Google Scholar. Lerner, Daniel defines political modernisation as “the transition to a participant society” whose “crowning achievement is constitutional democracy”: The Passing of Traditional Society; Modernising the Middle East (New York 1958), see esp. pp. 51–60, 67–71Google Scholar. An MIT study group openly describes political tendencies that are not western-oriented as ‘distortions’ or ‘diversions’ in modernisation: The Transitional Process in Macridis, Roy C. and Brown, Bernard E. (eds), Comparative politics: Notes and Readings (Homewood 1964), pp. 618–641Google Scholar. And finally, and most frankly of all, Lipset, S. M. admits as the ‘basic premise’ of his political sociology that democracy (on the American pattern) “is not only or even primarily a means through which different groups can obtain their ends and seek the good society; it is the good society itself in operation”: Political Man (London 1960), p. 403Google Scholar.

(37) Industrialism and Industrial Man, p. 283.

(38) Ibid.

(39) For a forceful critique of the functions of American liberal sociology in relation to American policy-making in which the propensity in question is amply documented, see Chomsky, Noam, American Power and the New Mandarins (London 1969)Google Scholar.

(40) Recent liberal versions of democratic political theory appear designed to give direct normative support to such a state of affairs.

(41) See, for example, The Poverty of Historicism, op. cit. ch. III. Popper here calls explicitly for a ‘technological’ approach to sociology and social reform, and urges the practice of ‘piecemeal social engineering’.

(42) Ibid. pp. 76–83, 107–119 esp. One may note also Popper's formal refutation of the possibility of historical prediction preed, sented in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London 1959)Google Scholar. Popper's general conceptions of the nature of science and of the scientific method have not, of course, gone unchallenged. But they have not, so far as I am aware, been questioned by exponents of the new historicism (or by others) in such a way as to make the enterprise more secure.

(43) Elaborating on Durkheim's proposition that “the stages that humanity successively traverses do not engender one another”, Nisbet (op. cit.) puts the point as follows: “It is not impossible to find conditions and also causes of change. What is impossible is to fix causality into the linear succession of events and changes with which the historian or social scientist deals” (p. 292).

(44) Cf. the cogent arguments in Peel, J. D. Y., Spencer and the Neo-Evolutionists, Sociology, III (1969), 173–191CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also the classic attack on Spencer from the historian's point of view, Maitland, F. W., The Body Politic, in Collected Papers, ed. by Fisher, H. A. L. (Cambridge 1911)Google Scholar. As Nisbet observes (op. cit.): “The question that has haunted the theory of development from its beginnings in the Western tradition is in fact that of how the external historical record can be made congruent with what purports to be a natural science of society or with those processes that are seen as ‘natural’ to a social system”, (p. 233).

(45) See his essay Futurology, loc. cit.

(46) See de Jouvenel, B. (ed.), Futuribles: Studies in Conjecture (Geneva 1963), vol. I, pp. IX–XIGoogle Scholar. All these points, and others relevant to the philosophy of ‘futuribles’, are developed at length in Jouvenel's seminal book, L'art de la conjecture, op. cit.

(47) See Kahn, and Wiener, , The Year 2000, op. cit. pp. xxvi–xxviiiGoogle Scholar; also Bell's, Daniel contributions to the issue of Daedalus, “Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress”, XCVI (1967), n° 3Google Scholar.

(48) See, for example, the content of the actual conjectures that are presented in such recent works (cited above) as Kahn and Wiener, The Year 2000; Young (ed.), Forecasting and the Social Sciences; and Jungk and Galtung (eds), Mankind 2000. The Futuribles series must be exempted from this comment.

(49) The Art of Conjecture, p. 105. Jouvenel gives as a paradigmatic case of a process that of inflation. As regards technological change, cf. the remarks of Bell on serendipity and synergism in “Toward the Year 2000”, loc. cit.

(50) As, e.g., through ‘Delphi’ techniques. Note, however, that such techniques assume considerable future stability in the general environment through which the process under consideration will run.

(51) Perhaps the most notable example of the one-sidedness in question is provided by the papers prepared for the “Next Thirty Years Committee” of the British Social Science Research Council, as represented in Young, op. cit. This volume suggests that the Committee virtually equated future studies with the forecasting of processes—on the basis chiefly of trend analyses—to the exclusion of any possible designs for the future which might be realised through large-scale intervention in processes.

(52) The Art of Conjecture, p. 103.

(53) See Bell, D., Notes on the Post Industrial Society, The Public Interest (1967), n° 6, pp. 24–35; n° 7, pp. 102–118Google Scholar; ID. Knowledge and Technology, in Sheldon, Eleanor and Moore, W. E. (eds), Indicators of Social Change: concepts and measurements (New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 1969)Google Scholar; Kahn, and Wiener, , The Year 2000, op. cit. pp. 6–13, 39–65Google Scholar.

(54) Kahn and Wiener, ibid. pp. 26–34.

(55) See in particular the work of Mishan, E. J.. In his book, The Costs of Economic Growth (London 1967), p. 39Google Scholar, Mishan launches a powerful attack on what he calls “the no choice myth” in regard to economic policy and on “the technocratic view of things, that envisages the country as some sort of vast powerhouse with every grown man and woman a potential unit of input to be harnessed to a generating system from which flows this vital stuff called industrial output”. Cf. also the most recent thinking of Galbraith, J. K. as found in the interview reported in The Observer, 22, 11 1970Google Scholar.

(56) The only value change that is at all extensively considered within the context of advanced industrialism is tho possible decline of the middle-class work and achievement-oriented ethic—because economically redundant—in favour of greater emphasis on leisure, private enjoyment, etc. But significantly, cf. point (ii) below, the likelihood of such a shift is discussed in conjunction with that of increasing alienation as a potentially serious social problem. See Kahn, and Wiener, , The Year 2000, op. cit. pp. 198–202Google Scholar.

(57) Shonfield, Andrew, in Thinking about the Future, Encounter XXXII (1969), 15–26Google Scholar, has characterised the whole Kahn-Wiener approach as a “highly simplified piece of economic determinism—in a familiar Marxist tradition”. In consequence it entirely neglects, inter alia, the possibility that changes in values might stem from political developments and imperatives, as well as from the economic order.

(58) Whereas, as, e.g. Berger, Peter and Luckmann, Thomas have cogently argued, in The Social Construction of Reality (London 1967), p. 82Google Scholar: ‘Logic’ does not in fact “reside in […] institutions and their external functionalities” but only in the meaningful character of human action.

(59) Cf. Bell, , Toward the Year 2000, p. 644Google Scholar; Kahn, and Wiener, , The Year 2000, pp. 158, 217–220Google Scholar.

(60) Duncan, Otis Dudley, Social Forecasting: the State of the art, The Public Interest (1969), n° 17, p. 88–118Google Scholar.

(61) See, for instance, F. E. Emery, Concepts, Methods and Anticipations, in Young, op. cit.

(62) It is thus on the basis of such a conception of politics that BELL can argue “the post industrial society will involve more politics than ever before”, while claiming at the same time that it will “require more societal guidance, more expertiser” and, presumably, that ideology will remain at an end. See Knowledge and Technology, loc. cit. p. 238. The foregoing remarks draw heavily on a paper, as yet unpublished, by my colleague, Dr James B. Rule, “The Problem with Social Problems”.

(63) Cf., for example, Bell, , Knowledge…, loc. cit. p. 158Google Scholar; Kahn, and Wiener, , op. cit. pp. 21–26Google Scholar.

(64) Knowledge and Technology, p. 160.

(65) The Year 2000, pp. 15–19, 199–202.

(66) The Art of Conjecture, p. IX.

(67) See, e.g., Jungk and Galtung, op. cit., Postscript. In the American case, Bell, Kahn and others prominent in the field have recently been under strong attack as exemplifying “counter-revolutionary subordination” and as failing in their responsibility as intellectuals on account of their commitment to the status quo. See especially, Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, op. cit.

(68) Jouvenel refers in this connection to ‘secondary’ and ‘tertiary’ forecasting. He notes, however, that by the stage that tertiary forecasts are being attempted—i.e. ones entailing guesses about the effects on trends, etc; of unique moves by probably only a small number of actors—historical predictions are being approximated. Thus: “Any confusion between ‘tertiary’ forecasting and other types must be carefully avoided”, The Art of Conjecture, p. 55. Given this view, it might have suited Jouvenel's purpose better to have distinguished more sharply between forecasting and conjecturing, and to have treated “tertiary forecasting” as a form of the latter activity.

(69) And, as such, they would of course be conditional, if only because of their historic specificity; and, in the same way as ‘possibilities’, subject to continuous revision.

(70) Deductions from theories may be taken into consideration, but the final forecast—about what will happen in the real world—cannot itself be so deduced unless, of course, some “theory of history” is postulated.

(71) A line of argument somewhat similar to the foregoing has, interestingly enough, been developed by a disciple of Popper, Jarvie, I. C.. See Utopian Thinking and the Architect, in Anderson, Stanford (ed.), Planning for Diversity and Choice (Cambridge, Mass., 1968)Google Scholar.

(72) In making much the same point, Jarvie refers, in an American context, to the case of urban development and renewal (Utopian Thinking…, loc. cit. pp. 17–18). In the British case, one might think of attempts at reducing economic inequality or class differentials in educational opportunity.