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Chapter 4 Social Psychology as an Historical Discipline Antti Eskola

In chapter 1, I concluded that social psychology should concern itself with human interaction and thematize this object from the point of view of cooperation. Social psychology investigates not only episodes where cooperation is visible and successful; it is also interested in episodes of interaction where one would expect to find cooperation but there is none, or where cooperation fails or turns into a conflict. In these cases too, the researcher can approach the episode from the point of view of cooperation. However most of the research done by psychologists, social psychologists and sociologists focuses on forms of human activity that seem to be based on decisions and acts by one individual actor: reading books, TV viewing, drinking, voting. Both the general public and the sponsors of research want to have explanations of why people drink, why they read books, why they vote for this or that party. Does our definition exclude these problems from the scope of social psychology? Or can they also be seen as a form of interaction and thematized from the point of view of cooperation? Below we shall find an answer to these questions in such concepts as ‘way of life’ and ‘mode of life’. These terms refer not to something universal and eternal, but to something that changes with history. Therefore, we shall soon fmd ourselves dealing with a question implicit in the title of this chapter: Should social psychology be an historical discipline? If so, what are the methodological and theoretical consequences? The use of an historical perspective means we will be needing data which informs us about people and their cooperative interaction in earlier societies as well as about the future course and fate of our present society. Now social psychology begins to look quite different from the traditions that were described in chapter 1.

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A. Individual, Mode of Life, History So, to go back a few sentences, can drinking or voting or other similar acts of the individual be regarded as interaction? I became interested in this question some years ago when I was working on a small research team that investigated book reading in Finland (for some of the project’s results, see Alestalo, Eskola, Eskola and KYoskowska 1978; Alestalo, Eskola and Eskola 1981; Eskola 1982). As well as historical data, we had collected material on people’s reading habits by interviewing a large representative sample of the adult Finnish population. There was one particularly hard nut that our methods failed to crack: a group who did not read books at all and who said they would not read even if books were shorter, more useful, more interesting, or easier to read. These people quite simply appeared to have no need to read. We got nowhere by asking further questions about reading. It was clear we would have to change our perspective; but how? 1. The Role of Community in the Individual’s Choices One solution is to use the method of Alexander the Great who solved his own problem by cutting the Gordian knot with his sword: accept that some people read books because it is part of their way of life, and others do not because it is not part of their way of life. The problem will now appear in a completely different light. Where just a moment ago the researcher was speechless and perplexed, his mind is now filled with intriguing questions and new ideas of how to answer them. Is it possible to speak of a distinct intellectual way of life of which reading is an integral part? Or does the technical and commercial intelligentsia have a way of life of its own where there is no room for books? What are the main determinants of ways of life? What kind of historical sources should one use to describe changes in Finnish ways of life? Can one member of a family have a different way of life to that of another? What kind of cultural and educational policies would change people’s modes of life in such a way that reading would become more popular? At about the same time that we found our own solution - not to the problem of non-reading but to the impasse we had reached - Finnish sociologists engaged in alcohol research started looking into the question

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of whether there were ways of life of which drinking was a part and others of which it was not; criminologists realized that the ‘crime’ of tax evasion goes with a different way of life than does the ‘crime’ of manslaughter; physicians became interested in illnesses as a part or consequence of different ways of life. There was a real boom of way of life studies in Finnish sociology, the marks of which are still evident in the latter half of the 1980s. The change in perspective means that reading, TV viewing, drinking, or voting are no longer something made up of individual acts; they are now regarded as forms of societal activity in which the individual does or does not participate. The individual and his practical activity are linked to society and the modes and styles of life that society offers its members. In other words, the problem is now approached from the perspective of the individual’s and society’s cooperative interaction. It is no longer a psychological but a social psychological problem.

Choosing a course of action It is no new experience in science to note that someone else has come to the same conclusion via a different route. In chapter 3 Klaus Weckroth followed the theory of psychological activity and arrived at basically the same conclusion as we did in our study of book reading. Weckroth reasoned along the following lines. In order for a child to develop into a subject in control of his own life, he must learn to master certain forms of practical activity. Whether it is playing the piano or football makes no difference; he can develop into a subject through either. The answer as to whether learning to play the piano is a better choice than learning to play football cannot be arrived at through psychological theory of subjective development. This is why we often turn to biology for an answer. The idea is that A will become a pianist and B a soccer player because they have inherited the respective ‘natural talents’. The biographer looks into the life of his subject’s ancestors for evidence of biological determinism, for some sign that would explain why their descendant became an artist, a mathematician, etc. But if we are perfectly honest, we have to admit that biological factors are very rarely decisive when making the basic choices that determine our course of life (although they may play some role in this). I cannot imagine that very many people who have learned to play the piano have done so

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because they have some natural talent that can only be used for this one form of practical activity. I myself would certainly disagree if someone suggested that a specific gene I have inherited is the main reason I have spent most of my grown-up life writing books. Compared with all the other factors involved in the decision, the role of biological factors must have been very small indeed. Weckroth says that the explanation of one practical activity often lies in some other activity: “I go to the library and pick up a book because I intend to read it, I read the book because I am hoping to pass my exams, I am taking the exams to get my degree and hopefully a good job” (p. 144). In this chain it is always a more general activity (e.g. graduating) that explains an act (e.g. taking an exam). The explanation is legitimate and adequate; it presents no difficult or deep problems. But there comes a point where the chain breaks. If we ask, “Why do you want to graduate in this particular field, why do you want to do this kind of work?”, the answer might be, “I want to work in this trade because it gives me the opportunity of a certain way of life”. It is more or less impossible to answer the next question in the chain with this method: “Why do you want to live in this particular way?’ ’ To find the answer, Weckroth suggests, we have to turn to other people: parents, friends, loved ones, society. When the individual makes the final choice in the chain, he subordinates his will to someone else’s: ‘I’ becomes ‘we’. He submits to his parents’ will, to the will of his loved one, to the will of God; this ‘foreign’ will has become an element of the individual’s personality (as in the matrix on page 44).

Ethical choices “Why do you want to live in this particular way?” comes very close to being an ethical question. It is indeed in many ways a useful exercise to place ethical questions alongside social psychological ones; among other things it may give us some idea of the proximity of the two sciences, ethics and social psychology. For instance, Wittgenstein’s study of the meaning of the word “good” - a pure example of ethical reasoning - is more or less analogous to our discussion above about explaining the acts of individual people. We said for example that up to a certain point acts can be explained by

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other acts and that this presents no difficult or deep problems. Wittgenstein (1965) writes that a sentence indicating that something is “good” can largely be understood relative to some criterion: “If for instance I say that this is a good chair this means that the chair serves a certain predetermined purpose and the word good here has only meaning so far as this purpose has been previously fixed upon. In fact the word good in the relative sense simply means coming up to a certain predetermined standard. Thus when we say that this man is a good pianist we mean that he can play pieces of a certain degree of difficulty with a certain degree of dexterity. And similarly if I say that it is important for me not to catch cold I mean that catching a cold produces certain describable disturbances in my life and if I say that this is the right road I mean that it’s the right road relative to a certain goal. Used in this way these expressions don’t present any difficult or deep problems.” We also said that in the explanation of acts by others, the final explanations in the chain cannot be found within its inner logic but must be drawn from outside the chain. In the same way, Wittgenstein says that no genuine ethical judgement can be contained in words or language, in a statement of facts reflecting reality; it must come from beyond language. A genuine ethical argument implies an absolutely coercive power. What we mean by the expression “the absolutely right road”, according to Wittgenstein, is “the road which everybody on seeing it would, with logical necessity, have to go, or be ashamed for not going”. However, no state of affairs has in itself “the coercive power of an absolute judge”. This is why Wittgenstein feels that reference to Ethics or Religion is only an attempt to “run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless”.

Can the force beyond the individual be explained? The reader familiar with Emile Durkheim’s sociology of religion and morals may be slightly confused at this juncture, where the social psychologist meets the philosopher interested in ethical questions. Durkheim sets himself the same problem: whence the coercive force that we sometimes call an ethical norm, sometimes the will of God? Far from hopeless, he sets out in calm pursuit of an explanation - and believes he has found it. The man who lives according to religion, Durkheim (1975) says, “feels within

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himself a power of which he is not normally conscious”. It is not an illusion; the power must really be there: “To explain religion, to make it rationally intelligible (...) we must find in the world which we can apprehend by observation, by our human faculties, a source of energy superior to that which is at the disposal of the individual and which, nevertheless, can be communicated to him. I ask myself if this source can be found anywhere other than in the very special life which emanates from an assembly of men.” (Ibid.) Durkheim thus comes to precisely the same conclusion as we do in our search for the determinants of the last link in the chain of individual action. The only possible answer is another person, or other people, who become part of the individual’s motivational structure or personality. Durkheim developed his idea in considerable detail in his study of the elementary forms of religious life in the light of the totemic system in Australia. The life of Australian societies, he says, passes alternately through two distinct phases. At times the population splits up into small groups that wander about independently of one another, hunting and fishing; life is slow and even dull. But there are times when the population gathers in certain places for a corroboree, which are intense and exciting events. The individual may work himself into a state of exaltation where he no longer recognizes himself. He feels as though carried away by some sort of external power. Primitive man does not however realize that his feelings and experiences originate from the group. In totemism he relates them to the animal or plant that is his totem. But in reality the totem is the symbol of the group, “the flag of the clan” which, when seen by the clan members, brings back the feelings experienced together. (Durkheim 1976, 214-221) So why is this explanation not good enough for Wittgenstein? After all, Durkheim offers a beautiful interpretation of “the coercive power of an absolute judge”, the explanation of which Wittgenstein considers a hopeless task. It is hard to believe that a wise philosopher would think of ethics in the same way as primitive man, who cannot see the community origin of the demands that religion imposes on him. There must be some deep problems. The truth of course is that Wittgenstein was perfectly well aware of the importance to every individual of the social world: “( ...) it was his philosophical conviction that the life of the human individual and therefore all manifestations of culture are deeply entrenched in basic structures of a

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social nature”, says von Wright (1982, 207) and continues: “The structures in question are what Wittgenstein called ‘Lebensfomzen’, forms of life, and their embodiment in what he called ‘Sprachspiele’,languagegames. They are ‘what has to be accepted, the given’, the unquestioned basis of all our judging and thinking.” This is the point beyond which Wittgenstein does not even try to go; the point beyond which an historical explanation can be found for societal forms of life - or at least where we should be looking for one. “This basis, to be sure, is not eternal and immutable. It is a product of human history and changes with history. It is something man made, and he changes. But how this happens is, according to Wittgenstein, not to be accounted for by a theory, or foreseen. ‘Wer kennt die Gesetze, nach denen die Gesellschaft sich hdert?’ (‘Who knows the laws according to which society develops?’), he asks, and adds: ‘Ich bin iiberzeugt, dass auch der Gescheiteste keine Ahnung hat’ (‘I am quite sure that they are a closed book even to the cleverest of men’).” (von Wright 1982, 207) The philosopher must confine himself to the ‘language-games’ of his own time even if he feels uneasy about this time and its modes of life, Wittgenstein says. Perhaps his failure to understand historical changes stemmed from the feeling that, however much he would have wanted to, he was unable by his teachings to change the ways of life of his own day. 2. Historical and Ahistorical Social Psychology

We have now come to the main question of this chapter; to the question of social psychology as an historical discipline. It would seem that this is what social psychology ought to be. But is this possible? Would social psychology do better to take Wittgenstein’s advice and concern itself only with the ‘interaction games’ of its own day - as it so often has done? And what does “historical” actually mean in this context? In the early 1970s Kenneth J. Gergen raised these important questions in an article that had a challenging title: “Social psychology as history” (Gergen 1973). The natural sciences, he said, have succeeded in finding universal laws because their object is relatively constant. The object of social psychology, by contrast, is affected by the very knowledge the discipline itself produces. The phenomena with which social psychology is

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concerned are also affected by historical factors. This is why social psychological research must primarily be seen as “the systematic study of contemporary history”. Ten years later, Gergen published a book containing some examples of historical social psychology (Gergen and Gergen 1984). The collection is rather confusing in that it is hard to see any consistency either in the ‘social psychology’ or in the ‘historical’ that the book refers to. It is clear that there is need for more theorizing around these questions. Everyone is aware that although nature as we see it today is a result of a long process of evolution, i.e. although it has its own history, there are natural laws that have applied since the beginning of time and that will go on to apply in the future. Is there something fundamentally wrong in the analogous idea that although society as we see it today is a result of a long process of development, i.e. although society also has its own history, there are universal social psychological laws that have applied throughout history and that will go on to apply in the future? Is it not possible to make a similar distinction in society as is made in nature between a surface that changes with history and all that lying below the surface which does not change? It is true that many social psychological ‘laws’ which imitate the form of natural laws do not function the same way as natural laws. Let us quote an example from Lieberson (1985, 63-87), who makes some very interesting comments on the issue. Boyle’s law is a typical example of natural scientific laws. It says that when the pressure of a gas (P) goes up or down, the volume of gas (V) declines or expands accordingly. The relation of P and V is constant (i.e. PV = K). Homans (1950, 112) attempted to formulate a social psychological law of the same kind: “If the frequency of interaction between two or more persons increases, the degree of their liking for one another will increase, and vice versa”. In reality however this ‘law’ does not work as Boyle’s law does, symmetrically in both directions. I may of course learn to l i e someone more if the frequency of our interaction increases, but it is not at all sure that my liking will decline to the initial level if our interaction decreases again. It is just as likely that we become eternal friends. Increased interaction was an historical factor that left a permanent mark on our relationship. The same thing happened in Sherif‘s experiments, as described in chapter 1. The subjects, who had changed their individual norms of estimation for a collective norm, did not drift back to

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their individual norm even after the setting was changed and they were alone again. So Homans failed. However, this does not have to mean that it is impossible to discover social psychological laws that work in the same way as Boyle’s law, or to narrow the focus of the discipline so as to make it “the systematic study of contemporary history”. Say a forest researcher formulates the following ‘law of nature’: “If the force of wind in the forest increases, the number of trees blown down by the wind will increase, and vice versa”. Here too the vice versa is misleading because in reality, the ‘law’ works in one direction only. When the storm abates, the trees that were blown over will not be able to haul themselves up again. The storm was an historical factor which left irreversible traces in the forest. Yet it has also been possible to discover laws in nature like the one formulated by Boyle. By now I can hear the impatient reader crying: show me one social psychological law that can be compared to a natural-scientific law! As a matter of fact we have already discussed one in this book: the law that is contained in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PI3 game (pp. 44 and 52-55). If either actor in this game takes into consideration his partner’s options and makes his own decision on this basis, choosing the alternative that is best for himself, then without fail the outcome for the two prisoners together is not as good as it could have been. And conversely, all other things being equal, the choices that from a collective point of view lead to the best possible outcome are not the best possible for the two actors taken separately. This is a universal law: If the aim in the PD game is the best possible collective outcome, then a social norm must emerge that forbids either party to confess (cf. Ullman-Margalit 1977). These laws do not change with history but they apply in all circumstances. Nor are they trivial laws. They have important practical consequences seen, for example, in the arms race, whose logic reflects the laws of the PD game. There can be no doubt whatsoever that, both in nature and in society, it is possible to discover (1) empirical regularities that change with history (and which usually show some asymmetrical causality) and (2) general, ahistorical laws, The former should not be confused with the latter. Social psychologists have done this frequently, especially when they have found empirical regularities in laboratory experiments. Apparently it is believed that everything discovered in the social psychological ‘laboratory’ must be

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a general law because it is in the laboratory that most of the natural laws have been invented. However, more often than not these findings are merely empirical regularities susceptible to historical change. The laws lie deeper, behind the regularities. It is a legitimate, perfectly respectable task to describe real-life phenomena and empirical regularities between them, even though they do change with history. However, both the natural scientist and the social psychologist should do more than just that. Social psychology should follow the example of the natural sciences and seek out general theoretical laws too.

3. How do General Laws Relate to Social Life? Is it possible to discover general laws that would describe changes in our ways of life? This was the question we were faced with when we realized that every meaningful act of the individual is in the end bound up with the changing forms of life that society offers to its members.

The place of ‘laws’ in nature and history The attempts of social psychologists to explain practical activity (reading books, drinking, voting) have usually been based on formulae of the kind represented in Figure 4.1. Figure 4.1. Typical model of explanation in social psychology f

‘Background variables’ x, y, z etc.

I

‘Laws’ A

determine

I

j

Practical activity of the individual

The aim is to detect lawful connections between background variables x, y, z etc. and the behaviour and action of the individual. In our reading study we tried to find out how the individual’s education and age determined his reading habits - and we did produce some very impressive graphs (see

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Eskola 1982). It is typical that the ‘laws’ thus formulated are considered to be either general and ahistorical (which they rarely are); or then historical in the sense that the reasons for drinking in the Middle Ages, for example, were at least partially different to the reasons for alcohol consumption today. It is believed that ‘laws’ will be discovered by using this or that method to arrange observations of variations in the practical activity of the individual: either inter-individual variations (as measured by a questionnaire, for example) or variations across different situations (as between different settings in the laboratory). If in Figure 4.1. we replace the words “practical activity of the individual’’ by “biological and physiological functions of the human body”, then it is an adequate description of the place of ‘laws’ in the natural sciences. If a human being is left without food for a sufficiently long period of time (‘background variable x’), he will be sure to die (all ‘biological and physiological functions’ will cease). This is a genuine law: there are no exceptions to it. But it is a biological, not a psychological law. As a psychological being the human individual, in his practical activity, does not necessarily bend to this law. It is true, as an empirical regularity, that if he has not had anything to eat for a long time, he will look for food and start eating. He will take into account the fact that if he does not eat, he will die. The prisoner who goes on hunger strike also takes this biological law into account and takes advantage of it. However in this case it leads to a completely different kind of behaviour: the prisoner refuses to eat for extended periods of time, sometimes to the point where he dies. A realistic model for explaining the relation of the active human individual to general laws is described in Figure 4.2. While nature (including the human body) obeys general laws, the human individual as a psychological

Figure 4.2. Realistic model of explanation in social psychology

~~

In his practical activity the individual

1

I

‘Laws’

P

takes into account that

if x, then y etc.

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being fakes info account these laws (insofar as he is aware of them). We cannot escape general laws, we cannot step outside them, but their place in human activity is different from their place in nature. It is quite possible there are general laws to be found behind historical change as well. However, humankind is not very likely to obey these laws in its development in the way nature obeys natural laws. The impact of these laws upon historical development is mediated by the action of humans, by their taking into account of these laws - in one way or another. Consider for example the argument of Marx and Engels that our mode of life is determined by our mode of production. This, they write (1976, 31-32), is why the mode of production is not merely the reproduction of the physical existence of individuals: “Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. Hence what individuals are depends on the material conditions of their production.” During the period of ‘orthodox’ Marxism, this argument has been understood the party way, as in Figure 4.1.: the mode of production is a ‘background variable’ that in accordance with a general law, mechanically and invariably, determines the mode of life. As Wallerstein (1986) has pointed out, ‘orthodox’ Marxism has a counterpart in the positivist thought of ‘liberalist’ sociology, which also attempts to impose the model of explanation presented in Figure 4.1;only its ‘background variables’ are different (e.g. values instead of material production). In the social sciences and history, however, we have to abandon this formula, in both its Marxist and its ‘liberalist’ version. On the other hand it is clear that with different modes of production people must take info account different laws, which leads to different modes of life. The community that makes its living by hunting must take account of the habits and movements of its prey; in a modem market economy it is the habits of the consumers and the movements of the markets that must be taken into consideration; and this in turn leads to considerable differences in the knowledge and skills that any given generation considers worthwhile handing on to the next generation, for instance. It is indeed both possible and

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advisable to interpret Marx’s and Engels’s argument in accordance with Figure 4.2.

What method is required to discover social ‘laws’? We have now located the place of general laws within nature and society. But how can we unearth the actual laws? The traditional method of social psychologists has been to organize observations made of the discernible world, such as the practical activity of the individual. Is this the method we are looking for? In the world of inanimate objects, visible objects obey laws that are not seen by the eye. The child is interested in these objects, but we cannot find our way beyond them and into the general laws without the help of science. This is an important difference, as Zetterberg (1963, 1) pointed out: “In our childhood many of us enjoyed reading some popular book in physics containing chapters called, ‘Automobiles’, ‘Aeroplanes’, ‘Radios’, ‘Guns’, etc. In high school, however, our physics tests did not have these titles. Now the chapter headings were, ‘Mechanics’, ‘Optics’, ‘Thermodynamics’, etc., and the cars, planes, radios, and guns occurred only as illustrations of the principles valid in these various branches of physics. The remarkable accomplishments of physical scientists made it possible to describe all the phenomena of the physical world in terms of a limited number of laws, which we call the theories of physics. We learned these theories, and had compact descriptions of the operations of planes, radios, guns, and many other things.” Practical activities in social life that correspond to cars, planes, radios and guns would be things like reading books, watching TV, drinking, voting. Beyond these are the general laws that people take into consideration in their activity, in much the same way as cars obey physical laws. The child is interested in visible action in the same way as he is in visible objects. What social psychology must do is lead us beyond the visible surface and into general laws. However, the social psychologist will not find these laws by studying visible practical activity - any more than the laws of nature were discovered by a study of the visible functioning of cars, planes, radios, or guns. Nor even of birds, for that matter, although at one point man did try this

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method as well: “There were many failures before humans successfully learned to fly. After watching birds flap their wings, bold and adventurous individuals built huge winglike structures, leaped off cliffs, flapped their wings vigorously, and broke their necks. There are principles of flight to be learned from watching the birds all right, but the wrong analogy had been drawn.’’ (Lieberson 1985, 3) There have also been bold social psychologists who have set out to discover general laws on the basis of the wrong analogy, flapped their wings vigorously, and broken their necks. This has applied particularly in cases where they have been looking for general laws of social activity in variations observed in this activity. Lieberson (1985, 88-119) shows us very clearly why this cannot succeed. One of his examples goes like this. Assume that a social researcher chooses a number of different objects for a study of gravity: a feather, a small coin, a large coin, a lead ball, a piece of paper, a pencil, a brick, etc. He drops them one after another and measures the time it takes for each to reach the ground; this is the dependent variable (Y). Variation in Y shall be explained by two independent variables: the density (XI) and shape (Xz) of the object. If all goes well, X1and Xz will together explain a considerable part of the variation in Y. But have we found the cause of falling here? Not very likely. The social researcher need not even consider the question of what the causes are that lie behind falling; no idea of the phenomenon known as gravity need come to his mind. The researcher can use the same method to measure different people’s level of socioeconomic status or SES (Y) and explain variation observed in (Y) by the parental family’s income (X,) and father’s education (Xz). Even if these two factors explained a large part of variation in Y, the result does not tell us “why SES characteristics exist nor why the particular system of SES linkages occurs”. (Lieberson 1985, 102) Or, to revert to our reading study again: variations in the reading of books could, up to a certain point, be explained on the basis of our survey materials. But when it came to the more profound question of what books, the system of producing books and reading books really mean in our society - we were unable to tackle this question with our method. These questions should not be new to the social psychologist who has read his classics. Kurt Lewin, in a lecture he gave on “Aristotelian and Galilean modes of thought in contemporary psychology” in 1930 (Lewin

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19351, presented very clearly the same methodological critique we have been outlining above. At this point it is not possible to go into Lewin’s argumentation in any detail; in a nutshell, what he was saying was that general laws cannot be discovered by statistical explanation of empirical observations.

B. Interaction and Cooperation in Precapitalist Society Our purpose above has not been to belittle the significance of empirical observations. In point of fact, observations are the only reliable and fruitful source for any theorizing. Kurt Lewin, for example, got the idea for some of his most interesting experiments from his observations of a waiter in a Berlin cafe (Marrow 1969,27-28). The waiter who served at Lewin’s table had not written anything down, yet he seemed to remember exactly what everyone at the table had ordered. Soon after the bill was paid, Lewin called the waiter over and asked him to write it again. “I don’t know any longer what you people ordered”, he said. “You paid your bill”. The question that this episode invites concerns memory: what is remembering, what does it mean, what is the force that explains this phenomenon? Lewin’s answer is the “tension” which a task generates in the individual’s psychological field and which is released when the task is completed. It was upon this theoretical idea that Lewin and his students designed and carried out one of the most influential series of experiments in the history of social psychology. It is easy to believe that the idea really did evolve from the cafe episode. Because what would have happened if Lewin had set out to study memory processes in the conventional way: explaining variations in remembering between different individuals by their personal traits or qualities (e.g. age) and situation characteristics (e.g. urgency)? No doubt part of the variation could have been explained by using these factors, but then the study would have omitted the fundamental question of what memory and remembering really are about. The fruitful idea of tension would not have emerged, a classical series of experiments would never have been carried out.

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1. Social Bond in Collective Life: Four Cases Let us now try Lewin’s heuristic method for ourselves; let us sit back and watch people interact and cooperate. Because we are concerned in this chapter with historical social psychology we shall be observing people not in a Berlin cafi of the 1930s but people who lived much earlier. The period we intend to focus on extends from the Middle Ages to the advent of modern industry and capitalism in Europe. As we are unable to make our own observations, we will have to make do with second-hand sources: the writings of historians and the people who lived in those days.

First case: Montaillou We shall start with the French mountain village of Montaillou in the early fourteenth century when the local Inquisitor began making detailed inquiries into the life of the villagers. The purpose was to flush out Cathar heretics or Albigenses. All the procedures and interrogations were entered in the Register, which is the main source of Le Roy Ladurie’s (1978) interesting book on the life and people of this medieval village. The kind of life that people led in those days and the sort of thoughts they had may all seem very familiar to the reader of Le Roy Ladurie’s book. Have people not changed at all? Have their relations in interaction remained essentially unchanged? At first glance, some readers may take the book as evidence that we have no need of an historical social psychology. It is important to notice, however, that when he picks up the book the reader already has certain conceptions about life in the Middle Ages, ideas given by history books, novels and films. Perhaps it is this that gives him the impression it is all so familiar? Or perhaps the author of the book has polished and interpreted his material to make it easier for us to understand it? This all changes when we use certain theoretical concepts to help us read and make observations. In The German Ideology Marx and Engels compared earlier modes of production with the present one, paying particular attention to the differences in people’s relations to nature and to one another. When the physical existence of people is reproduced using natural instruments of production, as in Montaillou, individuals are subservient to nature. In this mode of production “the individuals are united by some

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bond: family, tribe, the land itself, etc.”, Marx and Engels (1976, 63) wrote. In modern society, where we use instruments of production created by civdization, individuals are subservient to instruments that are products of labour. We cannot of course step outside nature, but now we are separated from nature by the technical instruments we have developed. The present mode of production presupposes that individuals “are independent of one another and are only held together by exchange” (26id.). Some clear differences begin to emerge compared with the life and thought of our day when looking at life in Montaillou through these conceptual tools. The people of Montaillou were not independent individuals held together by exchange only; the social bond that tied people together was of a different kind. The basic cell of life was not the individual but the peasant family. The Latin word they had for the family, abmus, meant house as well (cf. Marx’s idea that individuals are held together by “land itself”). For the village people, “the family of flesh and blood and the house of wood, stone or daub were one and the same thing” (Le Roy Ladurie 1978, 24). This entity, the domus, was more than the sum of the mortals who made up the household. The house was a moral entity with a personality which lived on after the master himself had died. All the evidence available, Le Roy Ladurie (1978, 30) writes, emphasizes the mystical and religious significance of domus, its central role in each person’s beliefs. Death, a very solitary event in modem society, was in Montaillou a social event regulated by domus. Likewise, the concepts of time and space were based on the collective nature of life and on the people’s close ties to nature. In social psychology textbooks and research, the traditional way of describing the group is by the kind of sociogram shown in Figure 4.3., where a number of dots representing the group members are linked to each other by lines, or relations between the individuals. The lines represent relations of attraction, i.e. who likes whom and who does not; or relations of communication, relations of power, or whatever. The point is that the group is understood as consisting of individuals and various relations between them. The only task remaining is to find the basic relation that holds the group members together, just as gravity keeps them on the ground. Is it liking or attraction? Or power? Communication? Or perhaps exchange? Figure 4.3. is not however a very accurate description of the medieval French village. Perhaps it is not as universal and scientific a representation

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Figure 4.3. Individualist concept of group structure

B

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as social psychologists have often believed, but a rather limited and ethnocentric one? In the past groups were perhaps more of the kind shown in Figure 4.4., where the circle describing the group is sliced into sections which represent the individual group members. The group does not consist of individuals, but divides into individuals. In the case of Montaillou, the circumference of the circle could represent the primariness of domus in relation to the individuals living in the house. The members are tied together by a bond of this kind that is above them, not by direct relations between them.

Second case: a Karelian extended family Our next example of interaction in precapitalist society comes from Finland prior to industrialization in the late nineteenth century: an old Karelian extended family. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century about one third of all households in Karelia in eastern Finland were houses where several families lived together. The family usually consisted of married brothers or a father’s and his son’s families and sometimes even of unrelated families. The largest households would be made up of dozens of people who were so distantly related that “boys living at one end of the house did not need

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Figure 4.4. Description of collective group

to go further than the other to find themselves a wife” (Voionmaa 1969, 409). Extended families were indeed a phenomenon of precapitalist society: by the early twentieth century there were very few of them left. However, they are not an anthropological curiosity peculiar to eastern Finland. They were also relatively common in Russia and all the way to the Balkan Peninsula in eastern Europe. We suggested above that the basic bond between people could be social exchange. Most social psychological theories of interaction are in point of fact exchange theories (e.g. Homans 1961; Blau 1964; Chadwick-Jones 1976) where people exchange anything from money and love to expressions of mutual respect and contempt. The point is that the man of exchange theories is an egoistic individual whose interaction is guided by the pursuit of maximum benefit, just like the players in the PD game. In calculating the benefit, we have to subtract the costs arising from attaining it; also, the greater the individual considers his investments, the greater the benefit should be. The man of exchange theories is a rational, calculating individual. Nevertheless, selfish though he is, he is satisfied with equal exchange if each of the individuals gains a net profit proportionate to his investment. If he feels he is getting less than the others, he will consider the apportionment unjust and become dissatisfied and ag-

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gressive. So could exchange represent the hard core of all cooperative interaction; does all interaction fit into the universal formula presented by exchange theory? Is exchange the social bond that under all conditions ties individuals together; is it social psychology’s law of gravity? Very probably not. Exchange theory is not as universal and scientific a representation as social psychologists seem to believe. As a matter of fact it is very limited and ethnocentric. No doubt the people of precapitalist Finnish society exchanged commodities and gave presents to each other, but the important interaction relations of the extended family cannot be adequately described by modern social psychology’s exchange theory. The member of the extended family was not the egoistic, self-interested individual of exchange theories, comparing his own benefits with those of others, especially of other members of the same family. The material rewards he received were not related to his contributions to the family’s economy. All did what they could around the house, and earnings from jobs outside the home were also pooled. Most needs were satisfied by common property - even fines were paid from common funds. Voionmaa (1969, 472-473) quotes a description of a Mordvinian family of the nineteenth century: “With the exception of a few trivialities, such as wedding gifts, no family member can have property that is his own, because the bee feeds upon the common comb, not out of his own pouch; (...I everything that belongs to the family belongs in part to him, but again everything that belongs to him must also be the common property of the family. Every family member is provided with clothes, shoes, food and drink at the family’s expense, and can be sure that he need not suffer from hunger or cold for as long as he lives with the family. If, as is often the case, he decides to work to earn some money, it is his duty to give all that he earns to the family’s common fund; he must never hide it, because if he so does, he would actually be hiding it from himself and not from others.”

Third case: Mill sect in western Finland If the individual member of the extended family had behaved like the man of exchange theory, he would have been in serious trouble; and there will be serious trouble for the researcher who attempts to turn exchange

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theory into a universal social psychological theory. This also applies to theories according to which group structure is universally determined by leadership or division of labour, both of which were sometimes lacking in precapitalist communities. One such community was the ‘mill sect’ established by riverside peasants in western Finland. Peasants used to build jointly owned mills beside rapids. Like extended families, these ‘mill sects’ went out of existence with the emergence of capitalism, at the latest by the turn of the twentieth century. It seems unlikely that sociometric descriptions or exchange theories could adequately describe the cooperative interaction within these sects. According to Aaltonen (1944), the formal organization of mill sects was rather loose. They did not usually have a leader, nor was there any distinct division of labour. If someone noticed that the mill was in need of repair, he would usually do the job himself. Meetings were chaired by whoever happened to be around. Minutes were not necessary at meetings because it went without saying that all agreements would be kept. Any member of the faction could represent it in court. The somewhat slack administration of the mill faction was nevertheless adequate and strong enough, “because it was based on equality and the sense of responsibility of every member”, as Aaltonen writes. It would be wrong to say that mill sects and extended families are some sort of anthropological curiosity. Aaltonen points out that the same features can be discerned in other collaboration between people and in selfgovernment. In the early seventeenth century the Estate of the Peasantry did not keep minutes of meetings, nor were matters put to the vote. In those days, “people simply could not understand the idea that the majority could dictate a decision that the minority would have to abide by, and therefore the Peasantry at that time tended to avoid votes: it was also unknown in court administration” (Aaltonen 1944, 203). When people were linked to each other through natural relations and not by a division of labour and exchange it was natural to assume that the group should take a common stand on issues. The group has to reach that opinion through discussion, and then every member of the group can consider it his own. It was not until the spread of the individualistic concept of man that a decision-making procedure became possible whereby a group decision is made mechanically by calculating the opinions of separate, equal and independent individuals.

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Fourth case: The Society of the Broken Dish The extended family of eastern Finland and the mill sect of western Finland disappeared with industrialization and the growth of the capitalist economic system. However, it is possible to find this kind of community, even in modern society. One such community was the peculiar ‘Society of the Broken Dish’, whose story is told by Georg Simmel: “Years ago, some industrialists met for dinner. During the meal, a dish fell on the floor and broke. One of the diners noted that the number of pieces was identical with that of those present. One of them considered this an omen, and, in consequence of it, they founded a society of friends who owed one another service and help. Each of them took a part of the dish home with him. If one of them dies, his piece is sent to the president, who glues the fragments he receives together. The last survivor wiU fit the last piece, whereupon the reconstituted dish is to be interred.’’ (Wolff 1964, 124-125) Figure 4.4. is a perfect description of this community, whose members

are tied to each other not by exchange but a mutual promise to help each other. The piece of broken dish that each member took home corresponds to the totem of the tribes that Durkheim studied: it revives shared feelings and the promise that was made. This society of friends could be called a moral society because its members are bound by a certain ethic. The question now becomes: Is moral activity more generally something that should not be described in terms of exchange? Kohlberg (1981, 409-412) outlines in his theory three levels of moral judgement, each of which is divided into two stages. The first level is “preconventional” moral, where in the assessment of acts one ignores common agreements or norms and aims only to avoid punishment or physical harm. The moral of the individuals of exchange theories would seem to be of this type; something that cannot really be called moral in the strict sense of the word. The kind of moral that Kohlberg calls “conventional” may perhaps also be fitted into exchange theories. Here, the individual seeks social acceptance of his acts and tries to avoid reproach, either in the eyes of his immediate environment or, more generally, as a ‘good citizen’. If we assume that a good reputation is the same as a reward and a bad reputation the ‘cost’ of gaining a reward, conventional moral can be described in the terms of exchange theories. Kohlberg’s “post-conventional” moral represents the level where right

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and wrong, or ethics in the genuine Wittgensteinian sense, is for the first time at stake. Acts are judged relative to moral norm systems, not to what is advantageous or to what the environment expects. Norm systems are regarded as more fundamental than the roles and rules prevailing in society; at the highest stage they are understood as universal ethical principles. Moral that rises to this level is by definition something other than the rational-egoistic behaviour of the man of exchange theories. An individual may do something because it is right, even though the act is harmful to him or he is despised for it. Or he may refrain from doing something because it would be wrong, even though the act would be profitable or he would be praised for it. Any attempt to defend exchange theories by arguing that observation of the general moral norm is a ‘benefit’ and breaking it a ‘punishment’ or ‘cost’ would imply forcing moral action into a totally unnatural schema, because genuine moral thought does not care about the benefit but about abiding by the norm. To better understand this way of thinking, we should analyse man as a rule-abiding actor (as HarrC and Secord, 1972, do). Analogous models of explanation are also found within the area of linguistic activity. Brown (1965, 407; 411), for example, draws a parallel between moral and grammatical systems that can be used for determining which sentences are right and which are wrong. 2. Was Collectivity a Result of Man’s Primitiveness? In the four cases we have just examined - Montaillou, the extended family of eastern Finland, the mill sect, and ‘The Society of the Broken Dish’ our focus was on the character of the social bond that bound individuals to each other. It seems that in preindustrial and precapitalist society, this bond was of a different kind than it is in most groups in modem society. But was this due simply to the fact that in those days people, in terms of their psychic constitution, were different from those of modern society? In other words: is it possible that historical social psychology could be reduced to the changing of man, to historical psychology? T o throw some light on this question, we shall now look at three further cases.

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Finnish man in the sixteenth century First we have a portrait of Finnish man in the sixteenth century by Renvall (1949), a Finnish historian who began his scientific career as a psychologist. He attempted to reconstruct a picture of the psychological structure of man in sixteenth century Finland by studying criminal law and judicial praxis at that time: what kind of crimes did people commit, how were they punished, what was the prevailing conception of gullt, of evidence, of diminished responsibility and extenuating circumstances, how did folk behave in court? On the basis of his materials Renvall concludes that sixteenth century man was so closely tied to his perceptions and immediate environment that if anything sudden happened in the environment, the response too would be very abrupt. In the words of Renvall’s long English summary: “Finnish 16th century man was not an independent individual, but a member of a community, very closely tied to his social environment. His life in general was for the most part the spontaneous community life of relatively primitive man. (...) One of the things that linked 16th century man with his environment was his highly emotional, affective attitude. He was never just an onlooker; he took up an emotional attitude towards everything that entered the sphere of his observations. He was specially sensitive to things that had a disturbing effect on his activities and aspirations. The equilibrium of his mind, supposing a mental state like that existed, was easily disturbed; his weak power of reflection went to the winds and affective indignation took hold of him. (.. .) On the other hand, 16th century man was bound by strong ties to the world around him because of the fact that he lived mainly in the world of his perceptions. His own inner world, the world of his thoughts, had very little self-sufficiency in comparison with his perceptions of the outer world. Consequently, he was far more a part of the field formed by himself and his environment than a separate individual, acting according to the requirements of his own mental world.” (Renvall 1949, 201-203) While it seems perfectly clear that the reactions of sixteenth century man were immediate and abrupt, I am not so sure whether they should be described as affectual; as being based purely on emotions. Perhaps the positive and negative feelings that came with success and failure were simply less controlled and accordingly expressed more openly than we are used to doing (see Le Roy Ladurie 1978,139). More important, man show-

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ed less self-control even in his action; his social responsiuity, which according to Asplund (1987) is one elementary form of social life, was more spontaneous.

‘Experiments’ with nineteenth century Russian Lapps Because of high social responsivity, social influence would not have assumed the same forms in sixteenth century society as it did in Sherif‘s and Asch’s experiments that we described in chapter 1. When man is closely tied to the outside world and his perceptions, his reactions to external stimuli tend to be sudden and violent. This was a distinctive feature of Russian Lapps as late as the early nineteenth century, as the peculiar ‘experiments’ in social influence by the Finnish explorer M.A. CastrCn suggest. On his expeditions he had heard stories about the surprising reactions of the Lapps, and now two Russian merchants offered to verify them: “Before they started they hid all the knives, axes and other weapons that might have been within easy reach. Then, suddenly, one of them stepped in front of the woman and clapped his hands. The woman immediately went for him in a fit of rage, tearing and ripping, hitting him with all her might. Once she had attacked the poor merchant she fell back, breathless, onto the bench. It took her some while to get her breath back. She recovered her equilibrium, and decided firmly never to allow herself to be frightened again. And the next time this happened she only uttered a piercing cry. While she was still rejoicing over the failed attempt, another merchant waved a handkerchief in front of her face, but at the same ran out of the room. Now the woman rushed around from one to another, tossed one on the floor, hit the other, threw a few against the wall, shook others by their hair. (...) We tried to frighten another girl by dropping shingle on her head. She screamed and ran out. We also banged the wall outside with a hammer. The woman was startled, but just at that moment someone covered her eyes and she soon calmed down.” (CastrCn 1870, 135-136) Studies in Asia after the Russian Revolution Finnish explorers (most of whom were philologists) often met with strange behaviour and ways of thinking on their nineteenth century expeditions. They did not however seek a social psychological explanation. They

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thought that Lapps and Samoyeds quite simply were a different kind of people to us; this was a good enough explanation for them. For example, it seemed that the only way these people were able to think was in strictly concrete terms. CastrCn (1870) met a Samoyed who was unable to say “my wife is ill” because in reality she was perfectly well. And when Donner (1979, 56) asked a Samoyed how to say “my river” in his own language, “he angrily replied that the river was not mine and that only Samoyeds were allowed to fish in the river”. Philologists were annoyed about having to work with such stupid people. It is not unusual to hear that people’s living conditions are also a direct consequence of the kind of people they are. This is not only the commonsense explanation; up to quite recently it was the ‘official’ explanation in textbooks too. For instance geography textbooks asserted that “Had Roumania been inhabited by a more enterprising people, it would no doubt today be a prosperous agricultural and industrial country”; or: “Russia is immensely rich in natural resources, but a major part of its income is lost because of an ignorant and lazy people”; or: “Sluggishness has made it (Spain) a poor country” (quotations from Finnish textbooks published in 1920, 1936 and 1951). The Soviet psychologist A.R. Luria started out on a completely different set of assumptions in his study of the early 1930s in which, under the supervision of his teacher Vygotsky, he examined the ‘primitive’ thought of people in outlying regions of Central Asia. His aim was to show that mental processes are historical in origin; that changes in social life and practice also bring changes in cognitive activities. He studied village dwellers in remote parts of the Soviet Union, areas whose socio-economic and cultural structures had not yet been affected by the Revolution. The subject was shown a picture of a group of objects such as a hammer, a saw, a log, and a hatchet. Then he was asked which of these objects did not fit in with the others. If the subject said they all belonged together, Luria would say: “Yet one man says the hammer doesn’t fit here”. This “one man” was concrete enough to be understood by the subject, and he could now go on by analysing why the other man was wrong: you use the saw to cut logs, the hatchet and sometimes the hammer to chop logs. The log is just as necessary as the other objects (Luria 1976, 91-99). Luria’s results are consistent with the theory according to which the form of practical activities that surround people and that they carry out

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through their own everyday acts is reflected in their thought patterns: in how they perceive, think, imagine. In remote areas everyday activities are concrete and directly determined by the object of action. Therefore people named colours according to concrete illustrations: peach, cotton in bloom, tobacco, calf‘s-dung. Self-analysis was equally concrete. When Luria asked: What sort of a person are you? What kind of shortcomings do you have? the answer would usually be: “Yes, well, my clothing’s poor (...I after all, I’m no longer young (...>” (Luria 1976, 24-26; 144-155). These results, however, say nothing about causal relations. They fit into the theory that people think in concrete terms because their way of life centres around concrete objects and concrete acts that are in direct contact with nature. But they also fit into the theory that they live this kind of concrete life because they are simple, primitive people. We need a dynamic, experimental comparison to find out which of these hypotheses is correct. This is exactly what Luria does next. He carried out his study at a time when collectivization and many other radical socio-economic changes, including the emancipation of women, were gradually spreading to the outlying regions of Central Asia in the wake of the socialist revolution. Active kolkhoz workers and women students at a teacher’s school were among the groups who had already been affected by the reforms. He therefore takes them as a control group and investigates their ways of thought too. His results show that these groups had a distinctly more modern way of thinking than the peasants or illiterate women in remote villages, even though they were the same people. The psyche of a people is not invariable; it changes with history, with alterations in living conditions and ways of life. It is wrong to explain social psychological forms of interaction by refemng to people’s thought; both of these change when people are forced to take into account the new laws arising from the new mode of production.

3. How Should the Past be Assessed? The few cases reviewed are but a fraction of the vast material available to historical social psychology; material from different eras, different countries, in different languages. Instead of presenting further examples, we feel it is more important to try to organize the material in some way. The

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medieval village of Montaillou and the Finnish man living in an extended family represent a specific type of community; but what would modem man think of it? There is something in these communities that seems to appeal to people living in the industrial society of today. In those days gone by people lived close to nature and each other in tight-knit communities. Many things that for us are painful and difficult were daily routine for them. Ferdinand Tonnies, in a book written in 1887, calls this kind of community a Gemeinschaft, where people “remain essentially united in spite of all separating factors’’ (Tonnies 1963, 65). In today’s highly differentiated society, where people are often troubled by loneliness and a feeling of detachment, there is a growing need for togetherness, for a feeling of belonging somewhere, a longing for the community of olden days. At the micro level, this is reflected in the popularity of the kind of group work known as sensitivity training (see Back 1972). The individual who in a T-group has experienced strong emotional attachment to the other members of the group hopes this feeling will carry him through the lonely hours of the next few days or weeks, in the same way as the clan members that Durkheim described carried the memory of their last corroboree on their lonely hunts. An example of the longing for the old days at the macro level is the rise of Green movements in Europe. In old communities there was no pollution scare, no dying forests, no threats of a nuclear power plant exploding, no threat of a nuclear holocaust. This is why people want to go back. Tonnies too is sympathetic towards the Gemeinschaft. He feels it is ‘organic’compared with modem society or the Geseflschaft, which he considers a ‘mechanical’ aggregate of separate individuals. In the latter people are no longer essentially united in spite of all separating factors, but “essentially separated in spite of all uniting factors” (Tonnies 1963, 65). In the former type of community people could (and often did) fight like cat and dog yet they remained united by certain collective factors that were above them. In modem society people may be strongly attracted to each other or bound together by official agreement; yet essentially they are separate individuals. The detachment is apparent for instance in the fact that no single person can represent the whole, because the whole is highly differentiated and very complicated: “In the Gesellschaft, as contrasted with the Gemeinschaft, we iind no

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actions that can be derived from an a priori and necessarily existing unity; no actions, therefore, which manifest the will and the spirit of the unity even if performed by the individual; no actions which, in so far as they are performed by the individual, take place on behalf of those united with him.” In the Gesellschaft people’s interaction is characterized by individualist egoism and the possibility to withdraw to private life: everyone is “by himself and isolated, and there exists a condition of tension against all others”. And further: “Their spheres of activity and power are sharply separated, so that everybody refuses to everyone else contact with an admittance to his sphere; i.e. intrusions are regarded as hostile acts. Such a negative attitude toward one other becomes the normal and always underlying relation of these power-endowed individuals, and it characterizes the Gesellschaft in the condition of rest; nobody wants to grant and produce anything for another individual, nor will he be inclined to give ungrudgingly to another individual, if it be not in exchange for a gift or labor equivalent that he considers at least equal to what he has given” (Tonnies 1963, 65). Shortly after the publication of Tonnies’ book Durkheim wrote a review of it in which he took an opposite stand on historical development. According to Durkheim earlier communities were no more organic than today’s societies, and he also emphasized the collective nature of the latter (Loomis 1963, note 27). In his book on the division of labour in society, Durkheim describes as “mechanical” the early community where the division of labour was still relatively undeveloped and where solidarity was based on people’s similarities and on strong pressure to conform. Man does not yet appear as an autonomous individual but the individual conscience “is a simple dependent upon the collective type and follows all its movements, as the possessed object follows those of its owner’’ (Durkheim 1933, 130). By contrast, in the society of “organic solidarity” where there is a highly deve!oped division of labour, people are separate personalities detached from their community. Conformity is not forced upon them but cooperation and solidarity are built upon norms that regulate inter-individual relations and interaction. Sociometry, exchange theory, and other similar instruments of social psychology have been developed by observing phenomena that occur in the Gesellschaft: separate individuals, exchange between individuals, etc. This is why they are suitable for the description and explanation of variations

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observable in modem communities. However, if we limit ourselves to this one task and to these instruments, we will be doing precisely the same thing as the researcher who tried to explain why different objects fall to the ground at a different speed although he had no knowledge of gravity; or the variations in socio-economic status without any idea why the phenomenon called SES exists in society; or the variations in book reading without even considering the question of what the whole system of producing and reading books really means. Nor are these instruments very helpful in a comparison between community and society since it would be unfair to evaluate the former with the methodological and theoretical tools that have developed in and from the latter type of society. It should also be obvious that we cannot produce a very accurate picture of society by an analysis of community only. We therefore need tools that can help us grasp both community and society at one and the same time on their own terms, and also to understand the historical change from the former to the latter; in other words we need an historical sociology and social psychology. Another important question - which is also of political consequence that can only be answered through a careful historical analysis is whether a return to community is even possible. If not, then all the craving is hardly worthwhile. Perhaps we should look ahead to try to help those people who find life in modem society intolerable; to try to find new solutions not by bringing back the Gemeinschaft, but by overcoming today’s Gesellschaft?

C. The Development of Modern Society: Some Classical Thematizations The change from the community life of olden days to the way of life in modem society is a subject that is discussed extensively in all the classics of the social sciences; not only by sociologists such as Tonnies, Durkheim, Weber and Simmel, but also by political economists such as M m and psychologists such as Freud. They all thematize the problem in their own particular way and therefore uncover slightly different aspects of the change. We shall spend the remaining part of this chapter studying these thematizations. We will start with Marx, then move on to the sociologists, and finally discuss Freud. Our main concern is not however with the classical writers themselves but with the classical problems they raise. The

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perspective from which we approach these problems is that of historical social psychology: that is, following our excursions, we always return to the question of the forms and historical change of cooperative interaction. 1. From Feudalism to Capitalism In Marx’s theory the factor that corresponds to gravity is capital. Capital is the ‘social gravity’ whose laws make capitalist society a totality, more than the mechanical sum of the forces pushing and pulling it in different directions. If we discard Marx’s methodological principles and describe medieval European society by enumerating some of its main characteristics, we will be left with a list that looks something like this: (1) Land ownership was the basis for all other social relations. (2) Therefore the class structure was hierarchic. The King and the Catholic church headed the hierarchy - and the King was usually regarded as the supreme owner of all land. Then came the nobility, and finally the peasants. There was a corresponding hierarchy in land ownership: the lord of the manor owned the land in his own province, his vassals held their own land and, within these limits, the peasants were entitled to their holdings. The entire population of the country lived off the toil of the peasants. The peasants handed their surplus product over to the other classes for consumption, not through economic relations but directly, through the coercion of the ruling classes. (3) With the exception of mass migrations caused by war, famine or religious movements, there was very little geographical or social mobility. (4) Most market commodities were the produce of so-called simple commodity production. The craftsman who made goods by hand owned his means of production. The product of his labour was his to sell. (5) People were more directly bound to each other than they are today. The village people could see how the cobbler, tailor and blacksmith worked, so they knew more or less how much work went into making a pair of shoes, a coat, or a scythe and they used this knowledge as a measure when they exchanged goods. The peasant saw in concrete form how much of the product of his labour he could keep and how much he had to give to the landowner. Power relations were very clear and the exercise of power was more visible than the often anonymous use of power in modern society.

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In his theory as to how feudal society transformed into modem capitalist society, Marx concentrated on point (4) of our list of characteristic features: commodity production. The change was inevitable, firstly, because of the development of the forces of production. New machines were invented, as were new sources of energy to run them. Simple commodity production was replaced by industrial mass production, and better means of land and sea transportation gave impetus to the growth and expansion of trade. Secondly, there was at the same time a revolutionary change in production relations when capital and labour were separated from each other. While the means of production had been owned by the person who made the product, in capitalist society there was, on the one hand, the owner of capital (machines, buildings, etc.) and, on the other hand, the worker, or owner of labour power. In the production of commodities these two elements must meet. This takes place on the labour market: the owner of capital hires the worker’s labour power for a certain period of time. In the labour process, within the factory, this labour power is put into productive use according to the instructions and orders of the owner of capital. The product of labour remains at the disposal of the capitalist. It is a profitable enterprise for him because he is left with the surplus value produced in the labour process: that is, the difference between (1) the value which the living labour creates in the production process and (2) the value which the capitalist pays to the worker in the form of wages and what is needed for the reproduction of his labour power. So in capitalism, surplus value is appropriated through economic relations rather than by coercive means. There is also another point of view from which we can define surplus value. With the expansion and development of capitalism the use-value of commodities, their utility for need-satisfaction, becomes of secondary importance in production. Their exchange-value becomes dominant. A new inner logic develops within the system of money and production. In the days of barter the peasant sold his products to the merchant for the things he needed; commodities were exchanged for money only for the purpose of getting some other commodity (C-M-C’). The use-value of the commodities was all that mattered. The logic of capitalist production is that money or capital is exchanged for goods in order to get more money, i.e. in order to increase the value of capital (M-C-M’). The added value is not created in exchange: the product is not merely bought at a lower price to be sold for a higher price. The surplus comes from the labour that is in-

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vested in the production of the commodity. The return on the amount of money invested in production (the difference beween M’ and M) is thus surplus value as defined from a different point of view. The idea of production is to transform labour into surplus value over and over again. Marx (1977, 254) says that the aim of the individual capitalist is not profit on any single transaction, nor to collect riches by saving money from circulation, but “the unceasing movement of profit-making”, which he achieves by “throwing his money again and again into circulation”. This is the process that ultimately transforms money into capital.

The logic of capitalism In his analysis of the forces that dissolved feudal society and created capitalist society Marx made a distinction between the ‘logical’ and the ‘historical’. There were factors during the prehistory of capitalism that were instrumental in the emergence of the new system but that were not part of its logic. Once capitalism had advanced to the stage where its own inner laws began to determine the course of its development, these factors disappeared (Zelenv 1980, 37). The role of these factors was particularly important at the stage of “primitive accumulation” where, for various reasons, capital began to accumulate in the hands of certain merchants and landowners, and where a large number of peasants lost their land and became the free labour force that capitalism needed. M a n (1977, 876) himself says that there is no single formula for this process: “The history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders, and at different historical epochs.” Thus the historical development of machinery and large-scale industry is a question that Marx (1977, 492-639) investigates strictly in the context of the capitalist logic. He starts his analysis by a quotation from John Stuart Mill: “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being”. Then, without further ado, he sets us on the theoretical tracks along which his analysis of capitalism moves: “That is, however, by no means the aim of the application of machinery under capitalism. Like every other instrument for increasing the productivity of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for

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himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing. The machine is a means for producing surplus-value.” This is the ‘logical’perspective from which he discusses the historical development of industry. Another important methodological distinction in Marx is between appearance and essence. Psychologists and sociologists who lean on the positivist tradition do not make this distinction, but paint a picture of their object on the basis of what is immediately apparent to the eye; they paint a picture of the surface of the object. Marx (1972, 817) however says that “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided’’ . There is more to capitalist society than meets the eye; the way it is portrayed by bourgeois ideology is not the whole truth. Let us take a closer look at three of the many facets that Lukes (1973) distinguishes in the ideology of individualism: (1)dignity, (2) autonomy, and (3) privacy. The first of these concepts implies that every individual human being has intrinsic value and should be treated accordingly. This idea is contained not only in official statements such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which begins by declaring its “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. It is also the basic principle of the kind of political democracy where people enjoy universal suffrage. And further, on the labour markets of capitalist society people appear as equal owners of their labour power or of capital: “The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man” (Mam 1977,280). These ironic words are meant to prepare the reader for the conclusion that recognition of the inherent dignity of every individual is no more than the surface of capitalism. The surface conceals existing inequalities, such as the fact that the worker is not only free to sell his labour power but also forced to do so; and that when this labour power is used, workers must struggle collectively to have laws passed in protection of their dignity (ibid., 415-416). Autonomy, the second basic idea of individualism, finds expression in the notion that every individual is free to make his own decisions. Although he is subjected to various external pressures, according to the liberalist and individualist concept of man he is capable of reaching practical decisions as

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the result of independent and rational reflection (Lukes 1973, 52-58). This is how we tend to explain the impact of electoral campaigns in political democracy: every citizen is conceived not only as an individual with inherent dignity (and therefore with a vote) but also as an autonomous voter who cannot escape political propaganda but who nevertheless makes his final decision autonomously. The idea of autonomy has a rational background in the historical development that released man from the bonds of feudal society and turned him into a free worker. At the same time however, this surface hides the new kind of ties that developed. As Marx (1977, 719) writes, “The Roman slave was held by chains; the wagelabourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads. The appearance of independence is maintained by a constant change in the person of the individual employer, and by the legal fiction of a contract.” The third basic idea of individualism, that of privacy, is that every individual has the right to withdraw into his own private area within which he should be left alone by others. The concept of privacy as we know it today came in with capitalism and the liberalist and individualist ideology. In ancient civilizations people who withdrew into privacy were regarded as not being quite human; they were like slaves who were not permitted to enter the public realm, or like barbarians who knew nothing of such life (Lukes 1973, 59-66). In the Middle Ages many of the things we today do in strict privacy were carried out in public. For instance, medieval etiquette and manners books told people how they should behave if they came across someone who was urinating or defecating in the street, or if they had to share a bed with another person (Elias 1978, 130-33; 162). But again the surface of the phenomenon covers up rather than reveals the whole truth. In reality our privacy is continuously being intruded upon by public authorities and their extensive data registers, although we might not always be aware of this. This trend does not arise from forces alien and opposite to individualism, but from individualism itself. As Abercrombie, Hill and Turner (1986, 151) summarize, “the very process that we have called the Discovery of the Individual not only gives importance to individuals, it also makes it meaningful to tell individuals apart, to identify them, to register them and ultimately to control them; the uniqueness of the individual is his subordination”. On the other hand the walls we build in protection of our cherished privacy prevent us from going out to help people or from cooperating with other people, even when this would be to

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the benefit of us all. What on the surface seems like a right to private life may beneath the surface mean a sentence to isolation.

Social psychological changes We noted earlier (pp. 168-171) that a change in the mode of production does not directly and mechanically affect the individuals concerned. They do however face a completely new situation. They must take into account new kinds of laws, confront and solve new kinds of problems. Through these processes of day-to-day practical activity, people also begin to change, even though it may take generations for the changes to become evident. Let us take a few examples. The replacement of the feudal by the capitalist mode of production represented a very profound social psychological change because it took place in one of the most important spheres of cooperative interaction, i.e. in production. It would be wrong however to identify new machines, for instance, as the ‘cause’ that under all conditions produced the same ‘effect’. New machines created new realities that people had to take into account in one way or another; but the reception they received was not the same everywhere. In England Luddites destroyed new machinery in the fear of unemployment, others accepted the change without any resistance. However, it is clear that in the long term people’s habits and ways of life were deeply affected by their new machine-paced jobs. In precapitalist society work was not understood as abstract ‘labour in general’, but as concrete work such as growing crops on a piece of land. It was carried out in accordance with the rhythm of the day and the year rather than according to abstract working hours. The skill requirements were knowing how to do this or that task. Children learned the job by watching other people doing it and by joining in. The immediate meaning of work was clear because all of its products were concrete and vital goods that were consumed by the family or people in the neighbourhood. All this began to change with the arrival of capitalism and industrial work. Although the worker is still doing concrete work on a machine, in the fields or an office, he realizes that he is also ‘working’ in a general, abstract sense, that his labour power is being used as part of society’s total labour force. This means that the individual who is made redundant is faced not only with a declining standard of living and problems as to what to do with

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his time, but also with being excluded from society in many different ways. Work is no longer carried out according to the rhythm of nature, but according to a set schedule and set rules. On the job the worker has to internalize a discipline that makes no allowance for his own temporary needs and moods; on shift-work he even has to upset the biological rhythm of his body. The most important job qualifications - such as reading, writing and doing arithmetic - have become so general that they are required in practically all kind of work. These skills are taught at school rather than learnt at home by watching other people working. The evolution of the modem industrial worker serves as a general example of how social psychological changes take place in history: rather than abrupt and dramatic transitions, there is a very slow transformation of the activities through which people respond and adapt to new circumstances. The new generation is in a different position to the one before it, and thus changes in a different way as well. Marx vividly describes the measures that were taken in the early days of capitalism to raise the labour power that the new system needed: “Thus were the agricultural folk first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wagelabour”. The socialization of later generations was much easier: “The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of the mode of production as self-evident natural laws” ( M a n 1977, 899). Although some of the changes described above took place with the advent of the capitalist system, they were not restricted to this system but were essentially connected with industrial work. If we are to believe Deutscher (1967,44), the process of industrialization also imposed new requirements on habits and work discipline in post-revolution Soviet Union: “The habits of settled industrial life, regulated by the factory siren, which had in other countries been inculcated into the workers, from generation to generation, by economic necessity and legislation, were lacking in Russia. The peasants had been accustomed to work in their fields according to the rhythm of Russia’s severe nature, to toil from sunrise to sunset in the summer and to drowse on the tops of their stoves most of the winter. They had now to be forced and conditioned into an entirely new routine of work. They resisted, worked sluggishly, broke or damaged

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tools, and shifted restlessly from factory to factory and from mine to mine. The government imposed discipline by means of harsh labour codes, threats of deportation, and actual deportation to forced labour camps.” This quotation invites another, where we see how the qualifications necessitated by industrial wage-labour - qualifications that “by education, tradition and habit” have already become “self-evident natural laws’’ to workers of advanced capitalist and socialist countries - are still lacking in the traditional village communities of the developing world: “In many parts of the world we find that one works as necessity calls; this may be the need for the day’s food, or for preparation for a ceremonial, or it may be the need of the land or the growing plant which must be attended to on that particular day. But the machine has no such insistent need; so if the worker has enough food or money for his needs, he does not see why he has to go to his job. In fact, if he also has a garden, or if the fish are running in the stream, he has a valid reason for not going.” (Mead 1954, 261) This brings us back to the difficulties with which capitalism had to struggle in its early days in Europe. As long as people had land it was hard to persuade them to move into the cities and sell their labour power. Thus there were two ways in which man had to free himself. First, he had to be ‘free’ from the means of production, i.e. he was not to own land or money capital. The dark side of ‘the logic of freedom’ is the loss of security that stems from this ‘liberation’. The bright side is that the individual is expected to own his labour power in order to be able to sell it. He must be personally free, that is he must not be slave to anyone (Marx 1977, 874). This means he is freed from feudal ties and constraints. He has more room to grow as an individual and as a personality. On the other hand new kinds of bonds bind him to the economic system that is no longer based on direct interaction with nature, but which might be called ‘another nature’ that man has created and that has its own inner laws. Erich Fromm was the first writer to analyse these two aspects of freedom from a social psychological perspective. In his book, originally published in 1941, he says that some historians have painted all too dark a picture of the Middle Ages by refusing to see anything but the numerous bonds of medieval man. Others have tended to romanticize the Middle Ages, the fact that man knew his place and rarely felt insecure. The feeling of security was strengthened by the Church, which had an explanation for

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everything. A truthful account must, however, include both aspects; and both changed when feudalism was overthrown by the new economic system: “Man was deprived of the security he had enjoyed, of the unquestionable feeling of belonging, and he was torn loose from the world which had satisfied his quest for security both economically and spiritually. He felt alone and anxious. But he was also free to act and to think independently, to become his own master and do with his life as he could - not as he was told to do.” (Fromm 1960, 85) The structural changes that took place in the production system eliminated some problems, although they created new ones too. They touched off a development that began to shape the personality of modern man, a personality less closely tied to his social environment and less bound by his immediate perceptions than that of medieval man. At the same time, however, these changes are at the root of such problems of modern man as loneliness, lack of power, alienation and anomie. But it is impossible to say if the development has been purely positive or purely negative; the evaluations of Tonnies and Durkheim are both true in their own way. The important question that remains is whether it is possible to develop such forms of social production and modes of life that the individual, who through his practical activity participates in them and moulds them, can retain his freedom, or release himself from the new bonds which develop beneath the surface of freedom.

An excursion: how to study book reading If capital is the ‘social gravity’ whose laws make capitalist society a totality, then obviously these laws should apply not only in production but in other spheres as well. How, for example, do these laws explain the research object that caused us so much trouble in our reading study: books, the production, distribution and reading of books? The crude answer we propose below is at the same time an attempt to summarize the numerous parallel processes we have referred to above. Our answer-summary is presented in Figure 4.5. Read it from the top downwards, from feudal to capitalist mode of production. There are two lines of change, as was discussed above. The line on the left represents the changes that take place on the capital side: capital accumulates, better

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Figure 4.5. Some factors behind the development of modern literature as an institution

FEUDAL MODE OF PRODUCTION 2. Detachment of individual from natural bonds

Manifest level: sale and purchase of labour power

---- - - - -- ----- ------

Cr --- ------------------------I

Latent level: use of labour power

I

FREE LABOUR POWER

CAPITALIST MODE O F PRODUCTION

1. Uifwcation of both pruducl and

labour p u r r into exchange-value and use-value

5 . Dominance of exchange-values: essential relations covered by surface

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machines are developed, factories are built. One result of this process is the development of the art of printing and the graphic industry. However ths does not yet explain the birth of the book. The right hand side of the figure shows what happens simultaneously to people: the reader is born. The bond that ties the individual to his immediate environment is severed, his intellectual world expands. Individualism that comes with capitalism is one of the main psychological conditions that made the novel possible, as Watt (1957, 60) has shown: “The novel’s serious concern with the daily lives of ordinary people seems to depend upon two important general conditions: the society must value every individual highly enough to consider him the proper subject of its serious literature; and there must be enough variety of belief and action among ordinary people for a detailed account of them to be of interest to other ordinary people, the readers of novels. It is probable that neither of these conditions for the existence of the novel obtained very widely until fairly recently, because they both depend on the rise of a society characterized by that vast complex of interdependent factors denoted by the term ‘individualism’.” Watt’s example of the connections between individualism and the novel is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Cmsoe, which Marx saw in the same light. “The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with which Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine”, he wrote. “It is, rather, the anticipation of ‘civil society’, in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth. In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate” ( M a n 1973, 84). Marx’s (1975, 221) keen eye also spotted the problems created by the retreat of the individual from public life into his own privacy, his separation from other people, his ‘natural surroundings’. ‘‘It is no longer the spirit of the state where man behaves”, he wrote. “It has become the spirit of civil society, the sphere of egoism and of the bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community but the essence of difference. It has become the expression of the sefiaration of man from his community, from

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himself and from other men, which it was originally. It is now the abstract confession of an individual oddity, of a flrivute whim, a caprice.” The reader however needs his privacy. The opportunity for this arose when people started dividing houses up into rooms. Now, when you wanted to be in peace - to read a book, for example - you could retire to your own room (see Watt 1957, 187-188). People had learned how to read because it was one of the new qualifications required of the labour force, as part of the total development of the capitalist system. But how did the modern novel come into existence? How does the book relate to devetopment in society? Georg Lukhcs and his follower Lucien Goldmann provide an answer to this question. The similarity of fictional literature and social reality, they say, should not be sought in their content but in the form of the novel and the structure of society. In capitalist society exchange-value and use-value are completely separate. The former dominates the surface of society and hides the latter from view. The modern novel has the same structure. It is a genre where the hero is separated from the world by an insurmountable rupture. The world in which the hero lives is dominated by unauthentic exchange-values. In a sense the novel is a search for authentic values in an inauthentic world. (Goldmann 1975) The word “authentic” deserves a brief personal comment, which might help clanfy its meaning. Some time ago, in a bookshop in Amsterdam, I came across a copy of a Dutch translation of my social psychology textbook. Naturally I was pleased to see “my book” on the shelf; but at the same time this particular copy also aroused a feeling of foreignness in me. Although it was my work, the form in which I now found it was the result of many other people’s work as well: translator, editor, designer, typographer. Without knowing these people, I had been in cooperative interaction with them and was now holding the product of this interaction in my hand. This was “my book”, but I had to buy it to get it for myself. My diary, in which I wrote about my feelings later on, arouses very different feelings in me. Since I bought it, no one but I has written on its empty pages; I alone have made it what it is. It belongs to me and me alone. This diary represents something of the authenticity that we have lost since the dawn of industrial production, which has separated us from the products of our work. The results of empirical reading studies very often consist of a

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miscellaneous collection of correlations between reading and various background variables. The Marxist totality principle means that between the most essential empirical relations there must be a logical connection that arises from capital and its laws. Figure 4.5. is intended to give a rough idea of what this principle could mean. It would be taking our excursion too far if we went into detailed examples of how the principle could be put into practical use in reading studies. Sat sapienti, by now it should be clear why we keep empirical generalizations separate from ‘societal laws of gravity’; it should also be obvious what relevance Marx’s method of analysis has for historical social psychology. 2. From Traditional to Rational Action

The Communist Manifesto of 1848 contains a vivid description by Marx and Engels of the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary role in history. The bourgeoisie, they write, has overturned the whole traditional world, including traditional attitudes to certain occupations: “(it) has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers” . From the traditional family, the bourgeoisie “has tom away its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation”. All spheres of life are increasingly pervaded by a new kind of rationality, ‘‘the icy water of egoistical calculation” (Marx and Engels 1967, 82). In the American school of ‘sociological social psychology’, the idea of tradition abandonment appeared in the late 1940s in David Riesman’s study of the changing American character. Riesman starts out from the days when the prevailing character was ‘ ‘tradition-directed” . The term refers to “ a common element, not only among the people of precapitalist Europe but also among such enormously different types of people as Hindus and Hopi Indians, Zulus and Chinese, North African Arabs and Balinese”. Behaviour was strictly controlled by culture. There were separate sets of rules for every situation, and there was no real effort to find new solutions or to change things, nor indeed was this permitted (Riesman 1953,26-28). However from the end of the Middle Ages there begins in the West “the slow decay of feudalism and the subsequent rise of a type of society in

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which inner-direction is the dominant mode of insuring conformity”. Behaviour is no longer controlled by culture, nor do there exist separate norms for every situation. Instead, there develops inside the individual a “psychological gyroscope’’ that keeps him on course: “it is implanted early in life by the elders and directed toward generalized but nonetheless inescapably destined goals” (Riesman 1953, 28-31). Riesman’s inner-directed man is however not necessarily any more rational than tradition-directed man. He chooses his goals and pursues them in a “rational, nonauthoritarian and noncompulsive” way only insofar as he is autonomous. But inner-directed man may also adapt to the demands imposed by society; in this case he accepts the goals and movement as “merely given” (Riesman 1953, 287). Here, as Kecskemeti (1961) points out, the classics of European sociology were on completely different lines. Tonnies, Durkheim and Weber attempted to describe how the nature of social activity was transformed by superindividual societal processes. Weber defined the change as a transition from traditional action to rational action: the transformation from tradition-directed to inner-directed took place as a result of increasing rationalization in all spheres of life in society, including socialization. For example, there were ethical norms that told people to work hard and that forbade all kinds of extravagance, thus serving as a “psychological gyroscope”. According to Weber, this kind of Protestant ethic began to spread with the emergence of capitalism (Weber 1930). So the kind of rationality that is represented by capitalism and the kind of character that Riesman apparently had in mind when he was talking of inner-direction, emerged in the same historical process.

Types of social action Collins (1986, 62-63) asks whether rationalization constitutes “the master trend of history” for Weber. It is not easy to answer this question because Weber gives a number of meanings to his key concept. The most fundamental meaning is incorporated in his typology of social action. First, action may be traditional, i.e. the actor observes habits and customs automatically, without much self-reflection. Second, action may be purely affectual. Rational action is different from both of these types: it is characterized by conscious deliberation rather than automatic or spontaneous response. In means-end rational (zweckrational) action, all aspects

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of action are taken into account and weighed: “the ends, the means, and the secondary results”. In ualue-rational (wedratzonal) action, the actor sets himself an absolute value goal with no alternatives; only the means applied in the pursuit of this goal will be chosen on the basis of rational deliberation. (Weber 1947, 117) Weber’s definitions are extremely terse but at the same time very careful. He is aware that purposeful action in everyday life, once it has been repeated often enough, may become almost automatic, and that “attachment to habitual forms can be upheld with varying degrees of selfconsciousness and in a variety of senses”. The borderline between traditional and value-rational action is not watertight; the former may shade into the latter. Also, purely affectual behaviour “stands on the borderline of what can be considered ‘meaningfully’ oriented, and often it, too, goes over the line”. For instance, the actor may consciously give vent to emotional tension. Value-rational action is however distinguished from the affectual type “by its clearly self-conscious formulation of the ultimate values governing the action and the consistently planned orientation of its detailed course to these values” (Weber 1947, 116). It is also difficult to draw the dividing lime between means-end rational action and value-rational action. For example: How do we describe a scientist who is ‘value-rational’ in making choices with regard to his research activities? Weber (1947, 116) says that examples of pure rational orientation to absolute values would be the action of persons who, “regardless of possible cost to themselves, act to put into practice their convictions of what seems to them to be required by duty, honour, the pursuit of beauty, a religious call, personal loyalty, or the importance of some ‘cause’ no matter in what it consists”. It is indeed possible to picture many kinds of researchers who meet these criteria. A ‘value-rational’ researcher is one for whom truth is an absolute value and who tackles only those problems and applies only those methods that, upon a rational weighing of the alternatives available, would seem to lead to the discovery of truth. But the ‘value-rational’ label can also be applied to the scientist who in his research work wants to give his faithful service to his country - or to the scientist whose aims are revolutionary. The common denominator between these types - which in many respects are complete opposites - is that, in Weber’s words, their activity “always involves ‘commands’ or ‘demands’ to the fulfilment of which the actor feels obligated”. The researcher whose

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activity is based on means-end rationality pursues his goals in a different way. His choices are influenced not only by scientific considerations, but also by current theoretical and methodological trends, prospects of obtaining funding for his research project, the career implications of different choices, etc. None of these criteria are alone decisive, but everything is subject to rational weighing, “the end, the means, and the secondary results’ ’ . However, if we start out from Beckermann’s (1985) interpretation that Weber’s typology of social action is primarily a description of how the legitimacy of an order may be guaranteed, then we need to repaint these portraits. In the context of science, the traditional type would be represented by the researcher who automatically follows the conventional rules of scientific work and never questions their content. The affectual type could be the young scientist to whom the rules of science are still new and stimulating. The value-rational scientist would be convinced of the absolute value of certain basic rules of science, such as Merton’s (1957, 552-561) famous institutional imperatives: universalism, communism, disinterestedness and organized scepticism. The means-end rational scientist would probably hold that the attitudes of all three are somewhat ‘irrational’. For him, the norms of science are legitimate, but he will follow them only insofar as he is convinced that they are the best way to reach his own scientific goals.

War, peace, and types of rational action It would seem that means-end rationality is the most ‘modem’ of the four types of social action. At the same time it involves some very interesting problems. We have already touched on some of these problems in our discussion of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, but let us now look at how the game works when set in the context of the arms race. The two actors in this particular version are the United States and the Soviet Union. It is assumed that they both reason along the following lines: The security of our people can best be guaranteed if our adversary refrains from armament while at the same time we continue arming ourselves. If our adversary does continue to arm, then our only alternative is to follow suit. In other words: whatever the adversary does, we must strengthen our military capability. Yet the outcome of this arms race is not increased security, but a deadly

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trap for the whole world. The best result would be achieved if both parties could decide on a mutual reduction of arms; this is why the US and the Soviet Union have spent so much time sitting at the negotiating table. But as in the case of the two prisoners, the tendency to go back on one’s word and the fear that one’s counterpart will do so, effectively undermine attempts at a solid agreement. If both superpowers pursue individual rationality and consider only their own security, then the result cannot be collective rationality for the world as a whole. But what type of action, in Weberian terms, does this kind of individual rationality represent? Imagine what would happen if we told the story of the two prisoners, or of the two superpowers, to the boy who in Andersen’s fairy tale cried, “But the emperor wears no clothes!” Having heard our story, he might say: “But you have to confess if you’ve committed a crime!”, or “If nuclear bombs can kill us then they must not be made!” Or: “If you’ve made an agreement, then of c o u m you must not break it!” It is clear that this child believes in some absolute value, such as truth, peace, or keeping one’s word. When he makes a rational choice regarding his course of action in accordance with this goal, he is value rational. The action of the prisoners and the superpowers is of a different type. They are not committed to any single option; they will settle for any alternative - confessing or not confessing the crime, increasing or decreasing military capability, keeping or breaking their agreement - so long as it serves their own individual interests. They rationally weigh the ends and the means. It is this particular form of rationality that lies behind the problems here, not rationality per se. The question is: Are we, in our cooperative interaction (or the superpowers in theirs), in some way predestined to this kind of means-end rationality? And what would happen if the superpowers went over to value rationality? Wouldn’t this mean even greater dangers for the world? A firm belief in the absolute value of a certain religious or ideological goal can indeed lead to the most frightful consequences, and can even mean war; it has done so in the past and it continues to do so today. One example of this kind of value rationality is the theory “better dead than red”; the ideological goal is more important than the ‘costs’, including human lives, that may be incurred in the pursuit of that goal. However, we cannot analyse the problems of war and peace only in formal terms, without considering the contents of the values upon which value rational action is bas-

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ed. It is perfectly clear that an absolute value can be found that, in questions of war and peace, could solve the problems involved in means-end rational action. The value that we are looking for is, very simply, the preservation of human life in the world. It is interesting that this value would not seem to be at variance with what may be called ‘the logic of capitalism’. “The unceasing movement of profit-making’ ’ , which according to Marx is characteristic of this logic, is of course possible only if human life is allowed to continue in the world. ‘Better dead than red’ is not at all consistent with the logic of capitalism; ‘the show must go on’ is much more like it. Our conclusion is in keeping with the observations made in the iterated PD games. When the game is played time and time again, cooperation between the players usually develops (Barry and Hardin 1982,378). The condition for cooperation, in a game between egoistic individuals, is apparently that both actors can be sure they will meet again so that they have something at stake in their future interaction as well (Axelrod 1984). Perhaps there is still hope that the superpowers, to guarantee the continuation of the game, will eventually accept a kind of value rationality and an agreement in which the absolute value is the preservation of life in the world. An important difference between man and the animal world is that humans are aware of their own existence. The human individual is also aware that he will die. As a result of the growth of knowledge and rationality, people have learned how they can postpone the inevitable fact of death and lengthen their lives. In traditional societies people believed that the world would also, eventually, come to an end. Their fear was not that the world would be destroyed by man, for everything was believed to depend on the will of God. This has now changed dramatically; we are more than well aware that man is indeed capable of exterminating all life on earth, whether by using nuclear weapons or by poisoning the environment. Collective self-consciousness no longer consists merely in an awareness that the whole species may become extinct, but also in an understanding of the decisive role of man’s own actions in the future of humankind - or in collective death. This provides a completely new motivational and cognitive basis for collective rationality. We no longer have to dream about solving the problems of modern Gesellschaft and rational activity by going back to the Gemeinschaft and traditional modes of action. In a historical perspec-

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tive the rationality of modern man is of relatively recent origin and is also rather underdeveloped; there is clearly room for improvement. One particularly promising line of development seems to run from individual meansend rationality towards collective value rationality. This is a development whose nature and conditions can be illuminated by an historical social psychology using the formulae of modern theory of action and Weber’s concepts.

Rationality and the ‘underdeveloped’ world In a comparison of the advanced industrial nations of the West and the countries of Asia, Africa o r Latin America where the level of industrial development is comparatively low, there are two ways we can analyse the differences: in the light of Marx’s concept of capital, or in the light of Weber’s traditionality-rationality dimension. In American sociology and social psychology the latter has been the more common approach. For example, in Lerner’s study from the 1950s, the key concepts in his description of change in Turkey and the Arab countries of the Middle-East are “the passing of traditional society” and “modernizing styles of life”. The word “capitalism” cannot be found in the index, nor is there any reference in the footnotes to Marx’s theory (Lerner 1958). For certain anthropologists the underdeveloped areas are simply ‘‘those which have not adopted the body of customs constituting industrialism”; thus “contemporary industrialization is viewed as a case of the more general phenomenon of acculturation” (Slotkin 1960, 9; 21). The advice that we give to the developing countries is this: Give up your old customs and traditions, imitate the egoistic and individualistic means-end rationality of the Western countries! If you run into difficulties, don’t hesitate to ask us for help - our social psychologists have the answer to all your problems! The well-known American psychologist David McClelland, for instance, holds that development arises out of something he calls “ n Achievement”, which apparently refers to what we are left with when Weber’s Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism are emptied of all sociological content, psychologized and operationalized. McClelland believes that the best way to help the developing countries is to put their petty entrepreneurs through training courses where they are taught how “to think, talk, and act like a person with high n Achievement” (McClelland 1978).

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It is hardly surprising that the Western social psychologist is occasionally ashamed of his ‘science’. A large part of it is not only simplistic and naive, but also forms an extension of the anthropological tradition that started in the imperialist era: the tradition that took for granted its imperialist framework but tried within this framework to be as liberal and humane as possible. A suitable motto for this attitude has been provided by the Finnish anthropologist and sociologist Edward Westermarck, who said in his inauguration speech at the University of London in 1907: “I am convinced that in our relations to non-European peoples, a certain amount of sociological knowledge, if appropriately used, would be a much more satisfactory weapon than guns and gunpowder. It would be more humane - and cheaper as well” (Westermarck 1927, 294). Discussing the differences between traditional and rational action, Lerner (1958, 49) says that “whereas traditional man tended to reject innovation by saying ‘It has never been thus’, the contemporary Westerner is more likely to ask ‘Does it work?’ and try the new way without further ado”. But what if we analyse why ‘it has never been thus’ and find a rational reason that is still valid? If the man living in the developing world adopts the Western conception of what is necessary or of what does and doesn’t work, he will notice that everything that works comes from the West, not from his own culture. This leads to a serious identity crisis that can hardly be resolved any other way than by indiscriminate acceptance and adoption of all that comes from the West, or by a fundamentalistic adherence to one’s own tradition. However, if in the move from traditional to rational action the values of one’s own mode of life are accepted as the cornerstone of value rational activity, then it will be seen that many of the elements of one’s own culture work perfectly well. Consider for example the traditional African family, which according to Mbiti (quoted in Uzoka 1979) “includes children, parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters who may have their own children, and other immediate relatives”. And that is not all: “The family also includes the departed relatives, whom we have designated as the living dead. These are, as their name implies, ‘alive’ in the memories of surviving families, and are thought to be still interested in the affairs of the family to which they once belonged in their physical life”. How stunted our Western ‘nuclear family’ looks in comparison with this! Uzoka (1979) has attempted to show that the theory of the ‘nuclear’ nature of the modern family is a harmful

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myth: “Clearly, the freedom to call on members of one’s family network in times of emotional need (for plain emotional support) without fear of social sanctions, remains the one essential freedom denied to modem western peoples”. As far apart as sacred and profane are also the methods of traditional African shamans and the ‘rational’ medical practitioners of the West: they cannot be applied simultaneously for the same purpose because they would both be rendered ineffective. However we cannot be sure that the former system ‘does not work’ and that the latter has a solution to every problem. Western medicine can only diagnose an illness and prescribe a cure. Unlike the traditional healer, it has no answer to the patient’s concern as to why this happened to him; all it can tell is what has happened. Rappaport and Rappaport (1981) therefore suggest a two-phase procedure where Western medicine concentrates on mending organic disorders and leaves the ‘secondary anxiety’ - the question of “why” - to the traditional healer. This is often how the urban African tries to find a cure: “Thus, an individual who breaks his or her leg frequently goes to a Western clinic to get it repaired. The individual then consults a medicine man to determine the cause for the calamity and for a prescription (figuratively) to alleviate the problem (scorcery and spirit).” Things get more complicated when we take into account the sociological fact that the developing countries are part of the social entity that may be called the capitalist world-economy. The context within which the move from ‘traditionality’ to ‘rationality’ is now taking place in the developing countries is completely different from the context of a nascent capitalism in which European man went through the corresponding process. We cannot transfer the theories of the classics of European sociology and social psychology directly to contemporary African society; nor can we introduce practical systems that disregard the role of the capitalist world-economy. It is not very likely that the idea of leaving ‘secondary anxiety’ to the traditional healer will survive because the developing countries are being flooded with drugs pumped in by the Western pharmaceutical industry. For Weber, too, rationality has the connotation of “something active, a force that masters the world rather than passively adapting to it or going along with routine’’ (Collins 1986, 62-63). This kind of ‘rationality’ has also infiltrated into Western social psychology, which prefers to master foreign cultures by imposing its own recipes rather than seriously considering the

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native cultures’ own values and goals and then trying to decide what is in their best interest. In this regard it is acting in exactly the same way as the multinational corporations. Perhaps we need to have our science rewritten from a Third World perspective and by Third World writers before we can even dream of a truly scientific and universal synthesis that would pull social psychology together. 3. The Elongation of Mediating Chains

In traditional society man is directly bound to nature and to the natural objects of his needs. His relations to the people he cooperates with are also immediate. In modern society these relations assume a more indirect, mediated character. Capitalism leads among other things to increasing exchange between people and thus to an expansion of indirect economic relations. Along with increasing rationality, people’s day-to-day interaction becomes increasingly regulated by written rules and agreements. Some of Weber’s theories strongly implied that “rationality is based on written rules, and hence on paperwork” (Collins 1986,63). This is one aspect from which the historical change we have been discussing can be studied: it can be thematized as the elongation of mediating chains. Social psychological ideas for a discussion of the importance of this point can be found in the works of Georg Simmel and some of his followers.

Food and eating as a case in point Before moving on to these theoretical ideas, let us take one example from daily life of what we mean by the elongation of mediating chains: food and eating. Unlike primitive man, who ate raw meat and fish, in modern society we now eat prepared food. Cooking, the use of utensils, heat etc. represent one mediation that has distanced man from the object of his need: food. Without these, modern man would have great difficulty in satisfying his hunger, even if he had plenty of fish and meat. “Hunger is hunger”, M a n (1973, 92) wrote, “but the hunger gratified by cooked meat with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth”. People living in advanced industrial countries are also eating an increas-

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ing amount of convenience foods. A new link has appeared in the chain of mediations: the fast food industry and the related advertising industry. Apart from reducing the nutritional value of what we eat, this new link also has wider implications. Now that cooking takes up less of the average housewife’s time, changes are taking place in our family life and in the position of women. The new mediations are having an impact on our way of life. When we go to the supermarket to buy food we can rarely smell or taste whatever it is we are buying. Most of the foodstuffs are wrapped up in plastic. To find out what the package actually contains, we must be able to read and understand the technical description written on the small stick-on label. So instead of concretely sensing, we have to be satisfied with the linguistic-theoretical mediation represented by the list of ingredients. Contrary to medieval man, we are not allowed to bolt down our food. We must use a knife and fork, remember our table manners, watch out for anything that is fattening or “not good” for us. It is not until quite recently that all these tools and rules and all this health knowledge has come between man and what he eats. They have deprived many of us of the joys and pleasures of eating, and have turned meals into tedious sessions where we measure the potential health hazards of every spoonful. New mediations have also appeared at the other end of the chain, in food production. The producer’s relation to nature and to the consumer was more or less immediate in the days when peasants still grew crops using simple tools and sold whatever they did not need directly to the consumers on market day. Now these tools have been replaced by highly sophisticated, expensive machines. Big poultry farms and pig units are more like industrial production plants than anything else. The farmer uses fertilizers and insecticides and all kinds of chemicals to improve the yield of his land. He sells the whole crop even before it has been sown by signing production contracts with big firms. One important mediating element between food production and consumption is state agricultural policy; so too are the planning, advice and training provided by various organizations. Agriculture and industry, which used to be fairly independent of each other, have now merged into one single ‘agro-industrial complex’. Its top priority is not the production of food for the people who need it, but the production of surplus value on capital investments. This is particularly clear at the global level. Vast numbers of people are dying through starvation even though the food produced in the world would easily suffice to feed us all.

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Even in countries where people are suffering from serious malnutrition there are factories producing consumer goods for the people of the industrialized world, rather than trying to meet the local needs. Production, for the average citizen, is taking place via so many mediations that it is virtually impossible for him to influence it in any way. However, in most cases the new mediations do not have a mechanical, law-like impact on our way of life. As is suggested by the formula we proposed earlier in this chapter, their impact is mediated by the process whereby people in one way or another take account of the new mediations. Some weigh the costs and benefits in a means-end rational way, others accept them only if they do not have to relinquish some absolute value. While the growth of new mediating links can be seen as a result of the laws of capital described by Marx, a study of how these links become incorporated through human action into our way of lie can be carried out with the conceptual tools provided by Weber.

From immediate to mediated relations Georg Simmel studied the differences between immediate and mediated relations in many of his writings. The simplest case of an immediate social relation is the dyad. A comparison of the dyad with the triad reveals some interesting differences. Simmel writes that the simplest sociological formation, methodologically speaking, remains that which operates between two elements: “It contains the scheme, germ, and material of innumerable more complex forms”. However these more complex forms are not straightforward multiplications of the dyad. The triad is not only a dyad plus a third member; the third person brings a lot more with him. The dyad has a different relation to each of its two elements than do larger groups to their members, Simmel argues. Although the dyad seems to the outsider like an autonomous and super-individual unit, this is not how the members of the dyad see it: “Rather, each of the two feels himself confronted only by the other, not by a collectivity above him. The social structure here rests immediately on the one and on the other of the two, and the secession of either would destroy the whole. The dyad, therefore, does not attain that super-personal life which the individual feels to be independent of himself. As soon, however, as there is a sociation of three, a group continues to exist even in the case one of the members drops out.” (Simmel 1964, 122-123)

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Simmel regards the phenomena related to the number of actors as typically sociological, for two reasons. First, these forms continue t o exist irrespective of the personality or motives of the actors involved. The withdrawal of one member from the dyad invariably destroys the group: “for its life, it needs both, but for its death, only one”. In the triad, the loss of one member cannot destroy the group because it will continue to exist as a dyad: “It makes the dyad into a group that feels itself both endangered and irreplaceable, and thus into the real locus not only of authentic sociological tragedy, but also sentimentalism and elegiac problems”, Simmel (1964, 124) philosophizes. These simple laws that are inherent in the logic of the dyad and the triad have far-reaching consequences. The second reason why Simmel considers these laws typically sociological is that they also apply to relations between groups, such as families, organizations or states. Freud (1963, 328-338) however gave a distinctly psychological content to these relations and laws in his theory of the chiid’s early emotional development. Following the stage of auto-erotism, in which the child’s libido is focused on his own body, the mother becomes his primary loveobject. The third element is the father, who in a tragic way turns the dyad into a triad. Boys develop hostile impulses against their fathers whom they see as rivals. When the boy realizes that his mother is also his father’s wife, his immediate relation to his mother becomes a mediated one: his feelings for his mother are mediated by the expectations of his father. For the first time, the child is aware that a social formation is not dependent on one individual. If the child withdraws from the child-mother dyad, it will cease to exist; it is depedent on him. But the coalition of mother and father will coiitinue to exist even without him, as if behind his back, working against him. The father has different rights to mother than does the child. However, an important factor is the promise that if the child keeps his immediate impulses under control and behaves himself, he will one day get the rights that are now denied him: he learns that socialization to the rules and customs is worthwhile. After this experience it is unlikely that the child can ever have an immediate relation to his mother, or to any other person. There are even extreme cases where people who fear a conspiracy involving a third person close their ears to all talk about love. When the value of immediacy is denied, the fabric of customs, rules and social games is no longer perceived as an obstacle and a difficulty, but rather as a network

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developed by civilization and providing access to greater riches than immediacy. Having collected these ideas from Simmel and Freud, we can now return to the elongation of mediating chains. These chains form a world apart, one that seems to have its own development. The greater the complexity of this world, the harder it is for ordinary people to understand it without explanations provided by various experts - which then become a new mediating factor. The individual cannot comprehend the way in which the world of mediations develops according to its own inner laws, and he is therefore overwhelmed by a feeling of powerlessness. Using Elias’s (1978, 71-103) game models, we may say that for the individual an increase in mediations means the same thing as an increase in the number of players and in the size of the field for the individual soccer player. When two players are passing the ball or trying to beat a defender and score a goal, the result of the game depends on no one but themselves. When the number of players is increased, the individuals’ contribution becomes less important. The larger the group of players and the bigger the field, the lesser the individual player’s control over the game and the more it becomes a social reality with its own development. However, if the players are divided into two teams, our individual - who has only very limited control over the game - is dependent on the game in the sense that if his team loses, he too will lose. This is very often the case in everyday life as well. ‘Games’ are played in which the individual has no say at all, but is still affected by the results. He can taste, see and smell the result of one very complicated game every time he sits down for a meal. With every meal he swallows a large amount of foreign substances that have been put into his food as a result of one mediated effect of the agro-industrial complex; but there is absolutely nothing he can do about it. If he buys a loaf or a can of beans, he must eat the additives they contain. There is of course another way to take into account this fact: he can move out into the countryside and grow the food he needs in his own garden. This will not alter the fact that he is affected by the compulsion, but the effect is now different. In the attempt to avoid the health hazards involved in eating convenience foods, he has changed his way of life. The increasing complexity of the mediating chains also leads to increasing power differences. Let us assume that a group of people are asked to

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judge by sight the distance to a mountain peak on the horizon. Some of the estimates will be fairly accurate, others less so, but the differences between the individual judgements will hardly be very signu5cant. If there is a device nearby that some of the people recognize as a distance meter and know how t o use it while others do not, then the differences in the estimates will be much greater. Those who use the device will give much more accurate estimates than those who do not know how to use it. The group is now divided into experts and laymen; the former gain in power relative to the latter. This analysis generally applies to both technical and social devices. When commodity exchange grew more complicated with the introduction of money, credit etc. between the opening and concluding episodes of exchange, the benefits were reaped by those who quickly understood the meaning of the new mediations and learned how to exploit them. The effect of computers has been similar. For those who know nothing about new technology they arouse a feeling of helplessness and confusion, for the hacker they open a whole new world. Third, in addition to feelings of powerlessness and increasing power differences, the elongation of mediating chains also gives rise to growing suspzczon. When a group of disorganized people work together they may quarrel and be suspicious of each other, but when they are organized there appears an added dimension of suspicion: the tension between the representatives of the organization and its rank-and-file members. Fourth, the increase in mediations also changes the motivation of activity, often as in the case of organization - for the worse. The purpose of setting up an organization is to find a more efficient method of furthering the interests of the membership. However the net advantage is not very great if at the same time the new mediation undermines the members’ determination to pursue a common goal and also increases egoistic and irresponsible freerider behaviour. Along with people’s growing awareness of these problems, various social movements have mushroomed that propose to simplify the mediating chains. Their aim is to dismantle organizations or at least to split them into smaller units in order to “increase citizen participation in decisionmaking”. They also want to do away with the dangerous chemical, technological and economic mediations that exist between man and nature. In some cases the people who are attracted to the ‘green’ movement also feel suspicious about the mediations that maintain distance between peo-

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ple: customs, rituals and social games. They would want to “open up”, to “touch”, to “express their feelings openly”. However, this road leads to a difficult dilemma. If the movement wished to pursue its goals effectively, it would have to organize itself and set up a political party - but the question of whether or not a party should be formed seems to be the most divisive issue within the green movement. The bad links that can and must be removed from the complex mediating chains in society will only be found in an analysis that is based on the skilful use of sophisticated theoretical and practical tools. And in human interaction, it should be clear that our social customs and games allow for much greater accuracy and richness in communication than is achieved when feelings are expressed “spontaneously”. The tools that human civilization has developed in the course of history mean that the human individual’s interaction with nature and with other people is mediated many times over. This creates serious problems, no doubt about it; but is it possible to solve these problems without the help of the very same tools? 4. The Problems of ‘Egoism’ and ‘Anomie’ As we now turn to a study of Durkheim’s ideas, it is useful to recall that we are searching for different ways of thematizing the modern mode of life and its historical evolution. On the surface we see factories, banks, large multinational corporations, the accumulation of capital; all those things that M a n organized in his theory of capitalism. Also characteristic of the contemporary mode of life is that different alternatives are considered and their consequences are calculated, that rules and agreements are put down in writing, and that the overall aim is to gain control of the current of events, or the rationalization of action, as Weber would have it. We can also see and feel that life is getting more and more complicated with the proliferation of new tools, rules and organizational innovations; an aspect that can be illuminated by an analysis 2 la Simmel. But what kind of phenomena do we see on the surface of the modern mode of life that could be elucidated by Durkheimian ideas? Durkheim was concerned with what in sociology is known as social disorganization. From his study of suicide in 1897, there emerge “some

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suggestions concerning the causes of the general contemporary maladjustment being undergone by European societies and concerning remedies which may relieve it”. Suicide, as Durkheim sees it, is “precisely one of the forms through which the collective affection from which we suffer is transmitted’’ (Durkheim 1952, 37). Durkheim’s study of suicide is so immensely rich in social psychological insight that the following pages are completely devoted to his book. In Suicide Durkheim not only sets out to build a theory of suicide, but he also presents statistical and historical observations of the phenomenon. Therefore some writers define his study as empirical sociology or as an historical study of social disorganization. Let us assume that from Durkheim’s theory a social psychologist derives an hypothesis concerning the relation between social conflicts and the control exercised by the social environment. To put this hypothesis to the test, he collects two different sets of information: first, data about riots, strikes and other conflict episodes; and second, observations of the social environment in which these episodes take place. For reasons that were stated in chapter 3 by Klaus Weckroth (pp. 126-1301, the search for universal laws using this method is as futile as trying to find a general cause of insomnia in the external characteristics of the situations in which insomnia occurs. It is quite possible that you cannot sleep because you are so happy; that you cannot sleep because you are so unhappy; that you cannot sleep because your life is so monotonous, devoid of both pleasure and griet it is also possible you had such a good night’s sleep last night that you cannot fall asleep now; or that you already suffered from sleeplessness last night and therefore you cannot sleep now. Similarly, a given social conflict can in principle be connected to any characteristic of the environment. If, using this ‘epidemiological’ method (which is described e.g. in Tilly 1981, 71), the conclusion is drawn that Durkheim doesn’t work or that he is “useless” (Tilly 1981, 95-108), then one should stop and think again: could it be that something else doesn’t work or is useless? If Durkheim had followed the methodological rules on the basis of which empiricists call him a failure, his work, which is now a classic, would have “taken its place among thousands like it, none of them contributing anything to our understanding” (Willer and Willer 1973, 2). True, Durkheim’s statistical data are unreliable and it is impossible to say whether or not his theory is empirically valid. But, as Asplund points out, the aspect that Durkheim takks up has added to our

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understanding; so far “the discussion of suicide has been a dialogue with Durkheim” (Asplund 1970, 58; 108). - Let us now enter into this dialogue, not only about suicide but also about the whole basis from which Durkheim approaches the problems of his time.

Does community still provide goals for individual action? It is true that Durkheim sets out to discuss what he calls egoistic suicide in the same way as an empiricist would. For example, he concludes from his statistics that suicide is more prevalent among Protestants than Catholics. This, he says, is because the Protestant Church is less strongly integrated than the Catholic. On the basis of this and other similar observations, he proposes the general conclusion that suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of the social groups of which the individual forms a part (Durkheim 1952, 159; 209). The empiricist has now found what he was looking for in Durkheim’s text. The next step is to think of a way to operationalize “the degree of integration of the social groups”. The theorist however reads on, his interest awakened. He is curious to know what kind of necessary relations lie beneath Durkheim’s proposition. First, he finds “society” which, when it is “strongly integrated”, “holds individuals under its control”. Just as individuals have goals, so too does society. Some of the necessary relations between these concepts are crystallized in the theoretical law according to which “society cannot disintegrate without the individual simultaneously detaching himself from social life, without his own goals becoming preponderant over those of the community, in a word without his personality tending to surmount the collective personality”. So the important question here is: Are the actions and decisions of the individual guided by the collective goals of strongly integrated society, or by his own individual goals? The society that is weakly integrated and conscious of its own weakness even recognizes its individuals’ “right to do freely what it can no longer prevent” (Durkheim 1952, 209). Durkheim fears that there has been a shift in emphasis from the former to the latter type of action with historical development. This is an aspect we have not yet dealt with, and one that complements those we found in Marx, Weber and Simmel. At this point Durkheim’s text becomes really exciting, at least for the social psychologist concerned not so much with random empirical

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regularities as with necessary relations. When the individual is not constrained by social control, he is free to set out his own goals and to make his own decisions, even regarding his own life and death. But Durkheim asks whether there is something in this “excessive individualism” that makes the individual choose death instead of life. Why is it that it not only leaves room for suicidogenic causes but is itself such a cause? Durkheim first rejects the explanation that the self-dependent individual would lose his interest in life because he has nothing which transcends and survives him. Immortality is too weak a motive for living because whatever we leave behind us will be very short-lived in any case. “Besides, what of us is it that lives? A word, a sound, an imperceptible trace, most often anonymous, therefore nothing comparable to the violence of our efforts or able to justify them to us” (Durkheim 1952, 211). No, dwindling hopes of immortality do not explain why excessive individualism undermines our zest for life. The explanation that Durkheim accepts comes very close to the ideas with which we started this chapter. Individuals need meaningful goals in order to be able to act. Up to a certain point the motives of these acts derive from the more general activity of which they form constituent parts. However, the motive for the last link in the chain must come from outside the individual, from the community. If excessive individualism breaks this last link, then the whole chain of action will become meaningless. “Ail that remains is an artificial combination of illusory images, a phantasmagoria vanishing at the least reflection; that is, nothing which can be a goal for our action. (. ..) So there is nothing more for our efforts to lay hold of, and we feel them lose themselves in emptiness. In this sense it is true to say that our activity needs an object transcending it. (. ..) No proof is needed that in such a state of confusion the least cause of discouragement may easily give birth to desperate resolutions.” (Durkheim 1952, 213) But even this is not all. When individual activity loses its meaning, the community level will be informed: “Since we are its handiwork, society cannot be conscious of its own decadence without the feeling that henceforth this work is of no value”. This collective consciousness finds expression in ‘currents of depression and disillusionment emanating from no particular individual but expressing society’s state of disintegration”. No one can escape these currents; they drive even the egoistic individual “more vigorously on the way to which he is already inclined”. The in-

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dividual is not cut off from interaction with society because “at the very moment that, with excessive zeal, he frees himself from the social environment, he still submits to its influence”. There is, however, a profound change in the structure of interaction. Integrated society provides the goals for the individual’s activity and does not feed a pessimistic atmosphere. In disintegrated society, the individualized man “effects communion through sadness when he no longer has anything else with which to achieve it” (Durkheim 1952, 214). Durkheim thus has a fairly clear idea of interaction between the individual and society and of how the structure of interaction changes with history. His theory clearly falls under the general heading of historical social psychology. The consequences of the structural changes in interaction are not mechanical and invariable at the level of practical activity, in the case of different individuals: not everyone commits suicide in a disintegrated society. This is why there is no sense in trying to h d - by any statistical method - strong correlations between variables describing the state of society and the activity of the individual. However, every individual must take into account the new situation; and the dynamics that Durkheim describes may indeed underlie some cases of suicide; cases that may be termed egoistic suicides. But what about the other types of suicide described in Durkheim’s theory; are they also based on the same view of interaction between individual and society? When we read about altruistic suicide, we learn that suicide is not only the result of excessive individuation; insufficient individuation has the same effects. In the former case, the individual’s activity has no meaningful goal because society fails to provide him with one; in the latter the goals are there but the individual does not consider them his own:. “Having given the name of egoism to the state of ego living its own life and obeying itself alone, that of altruism adequately expresses the opposite state, where the ego is not its own property, where it is blended with something not itself, where the goal of conduct is exterior to itself, that is, in one of the groups in which it participates.” (Durkheim 1952, 221) In the latter case the community also has the power to impose suicide upon the individual as a duty, to recommend suicide as a respectable act, or to suggest that suicide is the road that leads to the real goal in the hereafter. We are now in a position to compare egoism and altruism within the same framework of basic concepts:

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“While the egoist is unhappy because he sees nothing real in the world but the individual, the intemperate altruist’s sadness, on the contrary, springs from the individual’s seeming wholly unreal to him. One is detached from life because, seeing no goal to which he may attach himself, he feels useless and purposeless; the other because he has a goal but one outside this life, which henceforth seems merely an obstacle to him.” (Durkheim 1952, 225) Durkheim goes on to state that in a social structure that denies all freedom and value of individual goals, there emerge at the level of collective consciousness pantheistic metaphysical and religious systems. In these it is held that the soul which animates the individual is not his own and he has no personal existence. This kind of religion could be constituted only in a society where the individual counts for nothing, and to some extent it has an effect on the conditions that have produced it (Durkheim 1952, 226-227). Durkheim’s social psychology is perfectly plain and straightforward and it works. As a matter of fact the form of his basic social psychological concepts is very much akin to Freud’s basic theory. Where Durkheim has action and the goal of action, Freud talks about libido and love-object. The analogy is clear if the Freudian concept of narcissism is compared with Durkheim’s egoistic man for whom society does not provide a meaningful goal and who solves the problem by making his own physical existence the last object of his life. This, as Durkheim (1952, 215) writes, means that physical man tends to become the whole man. This is possible because “a whole range of functions concern only the individual; these are the ones indispensable for physical life”. The individual’s physical existence, health and well-being give adequate justification for them: ‘‘Since they are made for this purpose only, they are perfected by its attainment. In everything concerning them, therefore, man can act reasonably without thought of transcendental purposes. These functions serve by merely serving him. In so far as he has no other needs, he is therefore self-sufficient and can live happily with no other objective than living.” (Durkheim 1952, 211) In Freud’s theory, a distinction is made between three types of narcissism, which means the attraction of the individual’s love or libido to himself. A small child is narcissistic in the sense that he likes touching himself and sucking hs thumb, for example. As yet he is unable to make the elementary distinction between his own body and the outside world,

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unlike the adult whose love-objects are normally outside himself. However, even the adult indulges in narcissism in sleep, when he blots out the rest of the world and lets his psychic imagination, his dreams, take over (Freud 1963,414-430): The third case is the kind of pathological narcissism where the adult, in a waking state, is totally taken up with himself and his own body. The main characteristics of narcissistic personalities are grandiosity, extreme self-centredness, and a remarkable absence of interest in and empathy for others (Kernberg 1975,228). It is hardly surprising then that the narcissistic personality is also incapable of falling in love (Kernberg 1976, 186-188). Durkheim’s theory seems to imply that in a society where narcissism is prevalent, we can also expect to see corresponding trends in the culture of that society. Lasch (1979) has discovered a wide range of narcissistic tendencies in the culture of American competitive individualism. This culture, he says, “has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self”. The aspect that Durkheim brings up in his social psychological analysis is far from outdated.

Does community still regulate the individual ’s passions? In his novel The Slave, Isaac Bashevis Singer tells the story of a Jewish teacher by the name of Jacob, who lives in seventeenth century Poland. When the Cossacks attack the country, he flees and is caught by Polish robbers, who sell him as a slave to primitive and ignorant village peasants. Jacob’s life is so desolate, so hard and so poor that he prays for death and even contemplates self-destruction. Suicide under these circumstances would correspond to Durkheim’s third type of suicide: fatalistic. “It is the suicide deriving from excessive regulation, that of persons with future pitilessly blocked and passions violently checked by oppressive discipline. ” In fact one example that Durkheim (1952,270) mentions of fatalistic suicide is precisely that of the slave. Jacob however does not commit suicide. He resigns himself to living in his mountain hut with only just enough to survive, not only because of his poverty but also so that he can obey the commandments of.his faith concerning food, prayers, and washing. But when he falls in love with Wanda, a young widow, and breaks one of the commandments, all his passions are set loose: “Jacob could no longer control

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his thoughts. Every kind of absurdity and non sequitur crammed his brain. He imagined himself eating cake, roast chicken, marzipan; drinking wine, mead, beer; hunting among the rocks and finding diamonds, gold coins, becoming a rich man, and riding around in coaches.’’ Durkheim uses the term anomie to describe the state where passions are no longer held under any constraints. He makes a distinction between the regulation of goals of action and the regulation of action itself. In the same way as the community provides - or does not provide - the individual with a meaningful goal of action, it also regulates or omits to regulate action. If Jacob had actually broken away from all the rules of the Torah, as he occasionally did in his imagination, the normative context of his action would have become anomic; and if we are to believe Durkheim, he would have been in serious danger. It is as if Durkheim (1952, 248) is giving a lecture to all who want to eat cake, roast chicken, marzipan, to drink wine, mead and beer, to find diamonds and gold coins and to ride around in coaches: “Thus, the more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs. Shall action as such be considered agreeable? First, only on condition of blindness to its uselessness. Secondly, for this pleasure to be felt and to temper and half veil the accompanying painful unrest, such unending motion must at least always be easy and unhampered. If it is interfered with only restlessness is left, with the lack of ease which it, itself, entails. But it would be a miracle if no insurmountable obstacle were ever encountered. Our thread of life on these conditions is pretty thin, breakable at any instant.” It is easy to understand that anomie will follow from sudden richness or from a sudden economic upswing. But why does it also follow from sudden poverty or a sudden economic crisis? Doesn’t poverty put passions under very strict restraint? The restraint implied by the Durkheimian concept of anomie is not just any kind of regulation, but moral regulation. Durkheim (1952, 271-272) held that the growth of anomie in society, which followed from the increasing number of divorces and thus from the general loss of moral regulation through marriage, had a greater impact on men than on women. The psyche of the woman, he says, is different from that of the man: “Woman’s sexual needs have less of a mental character because, generally speaking, her mental life is less developed. These needs are more closely related to

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the needs of the organism, following rather than leading them, and consequently find in them an efficient restraint. Being a more instinctive creature than man, woman has only to follow her instincts to find calmness and peace”. Man’s passions, then, can only be controlled by social and moral regulation, which is provided by marriage: “For by forcing a man to attach himself forever to the same woman it assigns a strictly definite object to the need for love, and closes the horizon.” This forms “the state of moral equilibrium from which the husband benefits” ; particularly since custom “grants him certain privileges which allow him in some measure to lessen the strictness of the regime”. Durkheim’s study is hardly of great interest to the reader who is looking for a tenable psychological theory of gender; yet neither this nor his dubious statistics knock the bottom out of his social psychological theory (the same, incidentally, applies to Freud). One of the key concepts in this theory is the moral regulation exercised by the community. Society, Durkheim (1952, 241) writes, is not only something that attracts the sentiments and activities of individuals with unequal force: “It is also a power controlling them”. This system of regulation tends to break down in times of both economic hardship and economic prosperity; the same thing happens to the regulation system of the family when there is an increase in the number of divorces. Durkheim is perfectly consistent up to the point where he begins to analyse the differential effect of the new situation on different groups of people, such as men and women. Or does he perhaps already falter in his discussion of how anomie or a weak system of moral regulation affects people in general? The fact is that Durkheim also has his own psychology of the human individual and his hap.piness, and at certain points he makes some very crude simplifications. His psychology is based on the notion that nothing appears in man’s organic or psychological constitution which sets a limit to his thirst for pleasure, wellbeing, to comfort or luxury. His second main tenet is that without constraints, our desires are merely a source of torment: “Inextinguishable thirst is constantly renewed torture”; or: “To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness” (Durkheim 1952, 247-248). In a discussion of Durkheim’s psychologicalideas, it is necessary to make a distinction between two types of concepts that are related to motives. Certain of his concepts, such as “need”, are seen as pursuits that are

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quenched when satisfied to a sufficient degree, as in the case of hunger and thirst. Other concepts, such as “desire”, refer to pursuits that can never be ‘satisfied’ to the extent that they are ‘quenched’. In many old writings eating and drinking are praised as the greatest of pleasures, without any mention of satisfymg ‘needs’. It was natural for people to eat and drink as much as they wanted to. Scarcity would probably limit most people’s pleasures in any case. In the barter economy everything that was produced went for consumption. Little if anything was left over, and new needs developed slowly. When man has seen a sufficient number of days go by, he too can pass away like Abraham, “old and satiated with life”. The ‘need’ for living has been ‘satisfied’ because there is nothing left to be seen. Capitalism and industrialization mark the dawn of a very different kind of era. New needs keep occurring, no day is the same as the next. Civilized man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems, may become ‘tired of life’ but not ‘satiated with life’, says Max Weber (1958, 140). Durkheim’s concern about unrestrained desires is understandable against this historical background; his concept of man is dubious only if we take it as a universal truth of philosophical anthropology. And indeed, Durkheim (1952, 254) anchors his theory in history by saying that for a whole century, economic progress has mainly consisted in freeing industrial relations from all regulation, and that therefore, in the sphere of trade and industry, anomie “is actually in a chronic state”.

Uncertainty and ordeal Durkheim’s rich and imaginative study has inspired countless analyses and elaborations. One of the most interesting studies, from the present point of view, is that by Taylor (1982), who dissociates himself categorically from the positivist and empiricist approach. For Taylor (1982, 161), “science involves the explanation of observable phenomena through the discovery of underlying, unobservable structures and causal processes”. In chapter 1 (p. 29) we referred to the ass which starved to death facing two equally desirable hay-bales; to the philosophical construction that was created amid the medieval controversies about free will. We said that for the human being, uncertainty is a challenge that he must solve in one way or another - for instance by tossing a coin to decide which alternative to

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choose. Certainty-uncertainty is an important dimension for Taylor as well, as one explanation of suicide. He also refers to such ‘casting of lots’ as certain kinds of attempted suicide with which the individual reacts to uncertainty. The certainty-uncertainty dimension is closely related to Durkheim’s fatalism-anomie dichotomy, and Taylor cross-tabulates it with another dimension that comes close to Durkheim’s altruism-egoism dichotomy. He first couples certainty to the kind of “altruistic” life situation where the individual is not separated from other people but over-attached to them. Suicide (of the type “I am killed”) may result if the individual is sure that the other people with whom he is inextricably intertwined have abandoned him, deceived him, hope he will die. The person who is totally detached from other people (in the state of “egoism”) may also sometimes be sure that his life no longer has any meaning - if for instance he is incurably ill. Because he is separated from other people, no one can shake his certainty; here too the result may be suicide (of the type “I am dead”). The two other types of suicide are arrived at by combining uncertainty with social over-attachment and social detachment. In the former case the individual is totally uncertain as to whether the people to whom he is overattached care about him; he doesn’t know whether they want him to live or die. Attempted suicide, if the method leaves a chance of survival, becomes an ordeal with which the decision is made because there is no other way to cope with total uncertainty. It is as if the individual were trying to find an answer to the question concerning those other people: “Who are you?” But the same means is attractive even when the individual is isolated from other people and totally uncertain as to whether his life has any meaning (“Who am I?”). Taylor (1982, 173) defends the concept of uncertainty by noting that if a human being really commits suicide, he is not seeking the ‘unattainable’, so he is quite ‘nomic’. “It is hard to see, therefore, at least in terms of Durkheim’s conception of suicide, how an individual could commit ‘anomic suicide’. The position taken here is that individuals are more likely to contemplate suicide in situations of great psychological uncertainty. ” Durkheim’s social psychological theory of egoism and anomie touches upon real and important historical trends. In modern society the individual is less attached to his community than he used to be, which means that the goals of the individual’s activity are not immediately clear to him. The goal

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of action is crucially important because it is in this goal that the individual finds a meaning for his life. In the story of his life Viktor Frankl describes how the Nazis, when they took him to the Auschwitz concentration camp, dispossessed him of a manuscript that was ready for publication. Frankl decided he would rewrite that manuscript. This was the goal of action that gave a meaning to his struggle for survival: “For instance, when I fell ill with typhus fever I jotted down on little scraps of paper many notes intended to enable me to rewrite the manuscript, should I live to the day of liberation. I am sure that this reconstruction of my lost manuscript in the dark barracks of a Bavarian concentration camp assisted me in overcoming the danger of collapse.” (Frankl 1959, 165) It is important to realize that not just any kind of ‘activity’ would have helped. For instance, the sentries could have made him scribble nonsensical words on pieces of paper and then tear them up. This is in fact one of the many methods of breaking a prisoner mentally. In other words, the point is not that the person’s hands move, or that he behaves in some given way; nor even that the movements add up to some act with a given purpose. The separate acts must be part of a meanzng‘iul, objective activity; and the meaning derives from the community, in this case Frankl’s colleagues and the prospective readers that he had in mind when writing the book. Just as capitalism has solved its internal problems in a way that Marx was unable to foresee, so modern man has coped with the challenges of his ‘egoistic’ and ‘anomic’ mode of life with greater success than Durkheim could perhaps have anticipated. Indirect and mediated relations with people whom one can only picture in the mind but never see in person, can compensate for the absence of immediate relations. For example, there are still researchers in peripheral countries who do not meet their colleagues very often but who find a meaning for their life and their activity in writing, perhaps in a foreign language, to the ‘scientific community’ they picture in their mind. It is precisely by using his imagination that man has invented new ways of coping with the kind of situations created by increased ‘egoism’ or ‘anomie’. In some cases writing a book may also be an ordeal by which the writer wants to find an answer to the question, “Who am I?” If the critics treat him harshly (or if there is no response at all), he can still imagine that the time is not ripe and that his real audience must be somewhere in the future. Taylor’s concepts add important new perspectives to Durkheim’s analysis.

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It is likely that the relation between passion and happiness is also more complicated than in Durkheim’s presentation. Popularized versions of Maslow’s (1954, 80-92) theory of basic needs often have us understand that people should first satisfy their physiological needs, then their security needs, next their need for loving and belonging, their need for appreciation, and fmally their need for self-realization. The desire that refuses to comply with this scheme is labelled as ‘irrationality’, and there is also something very threatening and abnormal about the individual who aims to maintain his self-respect as a subject even at the expense of his health, security and personal relations; his activity is at sharp variance with our notions of the ‘natural’ hierarchy of needs. But should we really condemn Karl Marx as irrational and abnormal when he writes to his emigree friend in America (quoted in Ivanov 1982, 134): ‘‘NOW,why didn’t I answer you? Because I was constantly hovering on the edge of the grave. Therefore I had to utilize every possible moment to finish my book, to which I have sacrificed my health, the happiness of my life, my family.” In Marx’s opinion there is not much difference between the means-end rationality of ‘practical men’ and the behaviour of animals: “I laugh at the so-called practical men and their wisdom. If one wants to be an ox, one can naturally turn one’s back on mankind’s torments and look out for one’s own skin. But I would have regarded myself as truly impractical had I taken off without completing my book, if only in a manuscript form.’’ The motive power of Marx’s value rationality, its goal and meaning, derives from a community that he can only picture in his mind and that cannot exert direct control or regulation; he is addressing humankind as a whole. Yet he sees his audience as consisting of real, concrete, suffering human beings. The goal that has been derived from the pursuits of this community, as Marx sees them, is so clear and the motive power that it imparts to action so strong that there is no need for external regulation. In today’s world, when humankind is living under a constant threat of extermination, it is impossible for the individual to withdraw and pretend that nothing is happening; every day the mass media remind us that our fates are intertwined. To find out what the new situation means from the point of view of human activity, we shall now move on to Freud and see how he thematizes historical development.

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5. The Changing Face of Anxiety

In the summer of 1929 Sigmund Freud, well into his eighties and suffering from a painful illness, no longer had the strength to take long walks or concentrate on his reading. He had also realized that it was impossible for anyone to spend their holiday smoking or playing cards all day long, so he began to pass his time away by writing a long essay. It was published the following year under the title Civilization and its Discontents, which suggests that Freud now had something to say about society and culture. The book is also a description of the historical development of cooperation between humans, and in this sense ranks among the classical works of historical social psychology.

Sense of unhappiness and guilt Freud (1961, 76-77) asks what men themselves show by their behaviour to be the purpose and intention of their lives; he answers that they strive after happiness; “they want to become happy and remain so”. On the one hand this pursuit aims at an absence of pain and displeasure, on the other hand it strives towards the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure. However the pursuit of pleasure and happiness meets with three kinds of obstacles: those “from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men”. The reaction that these obstacles give rise to is not the same in all men. Different strategies are applied in the attempt to cope with them: we may withdraw from the world, suppress our needs, look for alternative sources of satisfaction in religion, or try to remove the obstacles to happiness. The latter is what culture is about. In culture Freud includes “all activities and resources which are useful to men for making the earth serviceable to them, for protecting them against the violence of the forces of nature, and so on.” Culture - or civilization, which is the more usual English translation of Freud’s term Kultur - is inherently historical, something that distinguishes eras: “the word ‘civilization’ describes the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our

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lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations” (Freud 1961, 89-90]. Freud yields a footnote’s worth to his temptation to speculate on the ‘psychohistory’ of culture. One of man’s most significant early cultural achievements was learning how to control and utilize fire. Freud (1961,90) points out that tongues of fire, as they shoot upwards, produce a phallic image. “Putting out fire by micturating (...) was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him arid subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct.” Woman became the guardian of the fire in the kitchen range ‘‘because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire”. Although Freud’s speculation merely reflects the kind of prejudice that was prevalent against women in those days and is of no value as an historical or scientific explanation, his theory about the relation of culture and the controlling of instincts hits the nail on the head. Culture not only prevents man from satisfying his immediate impulses. The riches of human culture are also a reward that the individual is entitled to if he submits to certain restrictions. There is however still one element in the picture: anxiety, which is the price that has to be paid for all of this. Culture places restrictions most particularly on sexuality. Along with civilization the once open, visible forms of sexuality have gradually become more and more mediated and transformed into representations of sexuality. Sexuality in all its variations seems to have flourished in the streets and in the not so private rooms of the mountain village of Montaillou much more openly than we have become accustomed to. “In the remote countryside a certain innocence still survived”, Le Roy Ladurie (1978, 151) says: “Many people were of the opinion that pleasure in itself was without sin, and if it was agreeable to the couples concerned it was not disagreeable to God either”. Children could watch their parents have intercourse, and even statesmen had nothing to hide: “in 1434 the Emperor Sigismund publicly thanks the city magistrate of Bern for putting the brothel freely at the dispose of himself and his attendants for three days” (Elias 1978, 177). Children do of course still learn about genitals and copulation and all the

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rest of it, but they now learn about it from their schoolbooks, pornographic videos and other representations, not through first-hand information. Freud has an explanation for why civilization is so eager to put sex under restraint: it needs it for its own purposes. Civilization aims at binding the members of the community together in a libidinal way and employs every means to that end, Freud (1961, 108-109) says. “In order for these aims to be fulfilled, a restriction upon sexual life is unavoidable”. However, the restrictions are also necessary for the purposes of the new economic system in that the kind of work discipline and rationality it requires cannot develop unless something is done to control people’s impulsive sexual life. Foucault (1979, 135-145) goes even further in stressing the connections between the use of power and restrictions on sexuality. He says that while the ruler used to have the right to take or spare human lives, power now means the regulation of the individual’s body and its use; power concentrates “on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls”. According to Freud (1961, 115) civilization imposes great sacrifices not only on man’s sexuality but also on his aggressiveness. There is ample historical evidence in support of this argument as well. Foucault (1977) starts his book with a detailed and horrifying description of how a criminal who had attempted to assassinate the King was publicly tortured in Paris as late as 1757; even children were allowed to watch this kind of episode. Such obscenities are nowadays accessible to children only in a form mediated by modern technology and commercial interests, as in the video of the Texas chain-saw massacre. Freud’s main argument is that the restrictions of civilization bring displeasure and anxiety to people. “In fact, primitive man was better off in knowing no restrictions of instinct” (Freud 1961, 115).The ultimate outcome in the process that is started by restrictions is a sense of guilt, which is produced by our conscience; which in turn is the result of restrictions: ‘‘instinctual renunciation (imposed on us from without) creates conscience, which then demands further instinctual renunciation” (&id., 129). However, civilization is “a process in service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind” (M.,

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122). This is why we might have to accept that “the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening sense of guilt” (ibid., 134). Besides, the sense of guilt is rarely perceived as such; it “remains to a large extent unconscious, or appears as a sort of malaise, a dissatisfaction, for which people seek other motivations” (ibid., 135-136).

Has civilization gone back on its word? But can the “tormenting uneasiness” (Freud 1961, 135) felt by modern man still be attributed to the restrictions he must submit to if he wishes to reach the goals that civilization promises him? In the very last lines of his book Freud (ibid., 145) voices his own suspicions that something has changed: “Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.” More than half a century later, the truth in these words is more obvious than ever. Civilization is no longer merely something that promises us a better and richer life; it also threatens to destroy all life on earth through pollution, radioactive leaks from nuclear power plants, or nuclear war. People have often been afraid that the world will come to an end, but so far these fears have not had a rational basis. Now this has changed. Not only do we know that there is the potential in the world to destroy all life, but we have reached the stage where the weapons systems (which by now could kill us many times over) are in fact deployed, actually pointing at us at this very moment. It is not the first time that humankind has been on the brink of extinction, but so far man has always been able to rebuild his conditions and mode of life. After a global nuclear war, this would be impossible. War is known to have started by accident in earlier times, but it has spread so slowly that there has always been time for reconsideration, for negotiation, for taking shelter. Now, the ‘accident’ that could trigger war is much more trivial than before; all it takes is a flock of birds or a systems failure. War will spread in a matter of minutes, cause irreversible havoc in a matter of hours. The change should be clear at least to those who experienced the 1960s in Western Europe and now compare those times with what things are like

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today. A useful concept in describing the difference is Ernst Bloch’s (1980) “not-yet”, which refers to something that “as yet is unsure and unsolved, but that for this reason is not out of the world”. Not so long ago not-yet was something that, for most people in Europe, aroused hope: not-yet rational and just society; but it was still worthwhile pursuing the goal and accepting the restrictions, because even though it was not-yet, as a utopian vision it already existed and had a definite impact on the world. Now, notyet is something that causes fear: not-yet nuclear war, not-yet dead forests. These things also have an impact on us; they are not ‘out of the world’. The impact they exert is not direct and mechanical but mediated by the processes in which people take account of these new realities. However, every decision must now be made in the new context, in an atmosphere where anxiety plays an increasingly important role. The young generation probably lives most clearly under this atmosphere, but nevertheless even those people must adapt who have drawn their historical wisdom from the experiences of World War I1 and the optimism of the age of reconstruction that followed: this wisdom is of little help in the new situation. The important question now is this: Is there any point in submitting to the sacrifices that civilization expects the individual to make if civilization itself has not kept its word? We have now, using different kinds of thematizations, run through the historical development of our society and come to the problems that are characteristic of modern society. It is time to close our classical books and see whether we can get to grips with these new problems using the methods of empirical social psychology.

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