Lasch—Circs Not Likely To Be Repeated

Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)

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The more the grand structure of Marx's theory has to be modified to allow for "exceptions," the less it explains. The entire history of capital-
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ism in the West now has to be seen not as a stage in a rigid sequence of developmental stages—as it was seen not only by Marx but by the nineteenth-century sociologists as well—but as the product of a particular history, a unique conjunction of circumstances unprecedented elsewhere in the world and not likely to be repeated. A growing awareness that modern capitalism rests on a "particular history of political victories and defeats," in the words of Roberto Unger, and that these victories and defeats can no longer be dismissed as the mere enactment of a preestablished design," has generated growing dissatisfaction with "deep-structure social theories" in general, as Unger calls them, including not only Marxism but classical sociology and its twentieth-century offshoots. The "deeply entrenched necessitarian habits of thought" associated with the sociological tradition have by no means disappeared, as Charles Sabel reminds us; but they have become increasingly hard to defend.

One of the many difficulties that confront structural theories of history is the achievement of "modernization" under conservative direction—for example, in twentieth-century Japan, in later-nineteenth-century Germany under Bismarck, even to some extent in nineteenth-century England under Disraeli. Industrialism, it appears, can take place without a revolutionary redistribution of wealth and political power. Social theorists in the nineteenth century almost all shared the belief, stated in its classic form in Tocqueville's study of American democracy, that the "irresistable" growth of equality had "all the chief characteristics" of a "providential fact," since it was "universal" and "durable" and "eluded all human interference." They argued about whether equality was consistent with order and freedom, but most of them agreed with Tocqueville that "the revolution . . . in the social condition, the laws, the opinions, and the feelings of men" was giving rise to a new order in which "great wealth tends to disappear, the number of small fortunes to increase; desires and gratifications are multiplied, but extraordinary prosperity and irremediable penury are alike unknown"—in short, to a condition of "universal uniformity."

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Here again, history has not lived up to expectations. Even if we ignore the persistence of inequality in the United States and Western Europe, the coexistence of industrial development with many features of "traditional" social organization, in a fully-developed country like Japan or in many of the developing countries elsewhere in the world, tends to undermine the assumption that industrialization and democracy go hand in hand. Forced to admit that economic development can take place under reactionary regimes, "without a popular revolutionary upheaval," Barrington Moore and other neo-Marxists have argued that a unilinear model of development has to give way to a more complex and flexible model. In opposition to "simplified versions of Marxism," they have called attention to the "Prussian road" as an alternative to the road followed by England, France, and the United States. "Conservative modernization" nevertheless remains an aberrant pattern, in their view. The lingering influence of structuralist habits of thought betrays itself in this formulation, since a deviant pattern of development implies a normal pattern—a revolutionary seizure of power by groups formerly dispossessed, as opposed to a "revolution from above." It was because Germany and Japan never enjoyed the advantages of a bourgeois revolution, according to Moore, that they had to modernize under autocractic regimes and eventually developed into full-blown military dictatorships. The moral is clear: instead of deploring revolutions in developing nations, instead of siding with the forces of order, Americans should support revolutionary movements as the only alternative to the repressive pattern of development sponsored by the right-wing regimes. "For a western scholar to say a good word on behalf of revolutionary radicalism," Moore writes
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with a good deal of exaggeration, " . . . runs counter to deeply grooved mental reflexes"; but an understanding of the "characteristic patterns of modernization" forces us to conclude that revolution is the better way.

That this conclusion rests on a tortured reading of history should be obvious at a glance. Early modern revolutions encouraged the growth of democracy, but the same cannot be said of the twentieth-century revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba, and other developing nations. The more we learn about these matters, the less we are likely to believe in "characteristic patterns of modernization." If there is such a pattern. it is surely western Europe whose history deviates from the norm. The Bolsheviks thought of themselves as modern-day Jacobins, but their revolution did not reenact the revolution in France. It was no more democratic than the autocratic programs of development instituted in Germany and Japan. Theirs too was a "revolution from above," as was Mao's revolution in China and Castro's in Cuba. If we consider the history of economic development as a whole, we might well conclude that it has everywhere been imposed from above. Even in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, it was seldom greeted with enormous popular acclaim. On the contrary, it was greeted with enormous popular suspicion and often with open resistance.

Nor was this resistance—usually dismissed as mindless opposition to progress—necessarily misconceived. The subsequent history of industrial societies does not justify complacency about their capacity to assure an equitable distribution of the fruits of increased productivity. The relationship between industrialism and democracy looks more and more tenuous and problematical. If we insist on a law of historical development, we might be justified in concluding that "societies based on large-unit production have a verifiable historical tendency to become increasingly . . . hierarchical over time," in the words of Lawrence Goodwyn. "Supporting evidence is so pervasive," Goodwyn adds, "that this may now be taken as law"—a "direct counter-premise to the idea of progress."

...

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The concept of modernization no longer dominates the study of economic development in the non-Western world; but the conceptually seductive images with which it is associated still color the West's view of its own history. ...

"Modernization theory, the critics say, ignores the independent role of
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the state in social change. It treats the state merely as a product of underlying social forces, ignoring its capacity for autonomous initiative. The theory underestimates the importance of political conflicts in determining the course of historical events. It puts too much emphasis on internal forces in developing countries and overlooks the extent to which the early advantages seized by the West rested on the exploitation of colonial possessions. Military conquest underlay economic expansion in the sixteenth century, and the discipline required by large-scale industrial organizations was first worked out in military establishments and only later applied to the factory. The modern state's dependence on military power may help to explain the continuing influence exercised by the nobility, allegedly displaced by the rise of commerce and industry. Those who adhere to the modernization model have no way of accounting either for the persistence of traditional elites or for the resilience of traditional institutions like the extended family. The coexistence of traditional and modern elements undermines the claim that modernization is a "systematic" process. It now appears to be a highly selective process; and this discovery parallels the growing recognition that progress in technology, say, does not necessarily entail progress in morals or politics.