Prospects For The New Nations

...Francis B. Burch and George W. Baker, Baltimore city solicitors appearing for the city school board, countered by saying that the religious observances were not compulsory and are considered by school authorities mainly to be a good practice for the benefit of the children and to put them in a good frame of mind...

...The Murrays are avowed atheists...

...But these modifications have not resulted from the mutual give and take which, Coser implies, rules the liberal state...

...Horst Brand apparently believes that one cannot write about a topic such as this without reaffirming the old verities...

...But to omit any reference to the role of the West is inexplicable to me, since that role vitally affects the "choice" the developing countries have, according to Coser, between democracy and totalitarianism...

...Of course, in some ultimate sense everything is connected with everything, but the logic of exposition requires one to suspend consideration of many of these connections at least for the time being...

...Their political and social development has been stamped indelibly by the nature of this encounter...

...Their native social fabric has often been deliberately torn asunder...

...Modern technologies and capitalist modes of production have been mercilessly imposed upon them by the expansion of the Western metropolis...

...In fact, the cultural, religious, and familiar characteristics of traditional societies which inhibit growth, may in part be explained as adaptations to the cruel and capricious demands of an unyielding nature...

...If, as well may be the case, the key to growth in the underdeveloped economies lies in the agrarian sector, the example of totalitarian Communism may not be so impressive...

...Coser stresses, with Weber, the role of the protestant ethic as a precondition of industrialism in the West...

...Murray's son, William, 16, had been spat upon, assaulted and subjected to schoolboy and teacher sanctions because he dared to walk out on religious exercises...

...And this Professor Coser really has done...

...The price of being a late starter in development is high...

...Social power in the 19th century was decisively located in the economic realm...

...Coercion via both juridical and market sanctions has been the major agent of the introduction of "rational" norms of economic behavior, to use Coser's language...

...The tasks of economic development, whose outcome gleaned from the history of the west promises an end to poverty and present discontents, can thus become a categorical imperative to which all behavior must be subordinated...

...Economic growth takes on extraordinary urgency...

...3. Brand fails to understand that though everything in the real world is indeed connected, analysis requires concentration on certain factors and the temporary neglect of others...

...One might simply endorse this statement as it stands, were it not that it keynotes an article that raises the experience of democracy in the West as Coser sees it to the status of a guiding example...

...The role of the state in the life of Western nations has become more pronounced...

...An aspect of this stagnation is that powerful interests can successfully insist on the shoring-up of reactionary and parasitic oligarchies...

...He who denies the limited autonomy of the political sphere cannot understand the history of modern Europe—or any other history for that matter...

...The illusion it conveys of a "democratic" economic development in parts of Europe and America serves to bolster the ideological position of the West...

...It spawns the illusion that political choices exist which are not determined by a given social environment—choices which are the more narrowly determined, the more intense the antagonisms that rend society...

...In Java, writes Wilbert E. Moore in Industrialization and Labor (Cornell University Press, 1951), "land restrictions have been instrumental in inducing natives to enter employment on plantations or in factories" (p...

...Brand, being an economist, ought to be fairly familiar with the "all other things being equal" procedure...

...Arguing for a Baltimore parent, Mrs...

...That illusion is heightened by Coser's discussion of totalitarianism...

...One can clearly make no dogmatic prognostications here, and I am perfectly willing to concede that for the time being the main drift doesn't seem to be in the direction I think possible and desirable...

...he simply has been unwilling to state explicitly what he in fact has shown—that the probability of non-democratic political systems in the new nations is greater than the probability of democratic systems...

...This class rule has, in recent decades, been modified, it is true...

...In all three of his models [democratic, authoritarian, totalitarian], social conflict remains in static balance, deadlocked, leading nowhere...

...And I am firmly opposed to Economic Exploitation...

...The advancing juggernaut of industrial capitalism was the central experience of the 19th century...

...Of course they can, but the purpose of social analysis is not merely to state potentialities or possibilities...

...He can't very well have it both ways...

...Pluralism has ever been the delusion of Social Democrats, unable or unwilling (or even fearful) to come to grips with the question and reality of power in class society...

...4. Where I have advocated a "hands off" policy in this article I don't know...

...de Schweinitz is more pessimistic in this respect...

...The adoption of large elements of Coser's "liberal model" by the developing nations is the programmatic point of his article...

...The liberal state was based on the class rule of the bourgeoisie...

...The Price of Starting Late I share Coser's concern that as the state assumes responsibility for economic modernization, the very process it nurtures may weaken those traditional and cultural values which now make it difficult for authoritarian states to become totalitarian...

...party, welfare, and many cultural organizations, even large corporations, have been virtually institutionalized...

...Yet, the evolution of bourgeois society has been characterized by features that men of libertarian vision have struggled against bitterly...

...I preferred in the article at hand to concentrate on the internal dynamics within the New Nations...

...3) Coser's use of "models" of polity prevents his defining the historical directions in which the new nations are in fact evolving...

...Now, one cannot reproach Coser for limiting his subject in the way he sees fit...

...But this has been characteristic of the evolution of capitalism...

...For countries like India, such policies would prove ruinous at the present conjuncture...

...I specifically stated several times that the liberal model is not applicable in the New Nations, and that a large measure of planning is a vital necessity for them...

...But as the action of blind natural forces eventuates in a calculable resultant, so the push and pull of contending social groups works in a definite historical direction...

...He observes that in their search for solutions to the enigma of development, westernized intellectuals in the new states have tended to discard the liberal economic model...

...But let that be...

...2. Brand accuses me of adhering to a naive and social democratic theory of pluralism...

...The imposition of head taxes or hut taxes, defrayable in cash only, was used deliberately in British Africa to drive native peasants into the money economy...

...Further, to the extent that new states are not yet nations, the "economic plan" may seem to have the political advantage of expressing goals that cut across parochial loyalties and values, and provide a focus for nation-building...

...The West remains co-responsible for their future...

...how they cope with sharpening class struggles...

...What are the real preconditions for despotism...

...I stand accused, but fail to understand why in his concluding sentences he states that "a plural state [is] indispensable for human development...

...Later, less uncompromisingly oppositionist thinkers like Mill, Hobson and Veblen decried it as well...

...The introduction of cheap manufactured goods, one of the better known agents of economic change, proletarianized large strata of craftsmen and their families in India and China, as it also did in Europe in an earlier period...

...The state was able to rely on the discipline imposed by the factory system no less than it could on its own penal institutions to maintain the liberal order...

...The "hands off" policies he advocates to promote democracy have subjected advanced countries like the United States to the grip of immobilism ("The Deadlock of Democracy" is the revealing title of a recent work by James MacGregor Burns...

...That evolution set the stage for totalitarian regimes, for it severed individuals from their social moorings, at the same time making social antagonisms ever more difficult to bridge...

...how they contain their own and others' hostile nationalisms...

...The use of these models obscures rather than clarifies the prospects of the new nations...

...Agrarian socialism...

...If they face any "choice," it is less likely to be between totalitarianism and democracy, than between chaos and a regime that safeguards some order and a modicum of economic advance...

...Not only is the underdeveloped economy galled and piqued by the "demonstration effect" of living standards in the mature economies, but its own living standards may be diluted by a rising tide of population originating in the mortality-reducing technology of the advanced countries...

...In the western world a unique combination of resource availabilities, geographical and climatic conditions, technological possibilities, and population densities permitted individuals, acting more or less independently of the state, to create the industrial economic order which, as Coser rightly observes, did so much to strengthen the centers of autonomous power in plural societies...

...Men choose, I would suggest, within certain limits imposed by the social structure in which they find themselves...

...The methods used to tackle these problems cannot usually be adopted by "choice," or even on the basis of a common consensus...

...I would add these observations...

...They can, though ruling as authoritarians, lay the foundations for a future democracy...

...Coser writes that "We have to recognize that some or all of the new nations will present features deeply distasteful to men of a libertarian vision...

...Forced labor, ranging from indenture to slavery "has been more common in world economic development than has free contract labor" (Moore, p. 59...

...That the Soviet Union has achieved impressive production records year after year is undeniable...

...Capitalism flourished under the British liberal regime, but it also developed under Bismarck and Napoleon III...

...In conclusion let me say that I am far from being convinced that totalitarian political orders represent the wave of the future...

...They (Coser included) elevate what dispersion of power does exist in the liberal state to a sort of ideal mechanical equilibrium, a "social statics...

...And what is more, the developing nations have encountered the West as master and exploiter, not as teacher...

...Lewis Coser's analysis of the prospects for political development in the new nations is an extremely lucid treatment of a notably intransigent subject...

...More concretely, economic structures, such as capitalism, do not in and of themselves determine political structures...

...Land policies in South and East Africa pursued the same objectives...

...the rise and struggles of the labor and socialist movements its salient political event...

...Examples abound...

...II Coser has nothing to say about the role of the West insofar as it affects the future of the developing countries...

...For the developing countries, problems they have inherited from their earlier encounter with the West are made more burdensome—and the chances of authoritarian solutions are enhanced by—the social and political stagnation of the West...

...Great leaps forward," distinguished only for being neither great nor forward, are not a surprising consequence of a system that inhibits the opportunity for criticizing the nostrums of party leaders...

...I am not unaware of the fact that the West has a powerful influence on the further development of the New Nations—as has the East...

...Is it towards some form of state capitalism...

...And the evidence continues to mount of troubles in the Communist countryside, arising in part from the Communists' paranoiac fear of the peasantry and their unwillingness to give greater play to individual incentives...

...He attributes to them the ability to choose among political modes...

...A plural state, the widening of the areas of democracy, social equality, an internationalist spirit, greater individual self-determination—all are indispensable to human development...

...Yet the inflexibility of totalitarian political orders —the insistence on ideological conformity and the consequent suppression of free and open discussion—has also created economic problems...

...He declares, "It is no longer sufficient to applaud the demise of imperialism," and then goes on to treat the problems facing these countries as if they were theirs alone...

...it is to assign probabilities to alternative social outcomes...

...In fact the whole burden of my piece was to show that the situation in which they find themselves precludes for the time being various types of "choices," such as parliamentary democracy, the application of the liberal model, or democratic socialism...

...I prefer to think that in later stages other alternatives may open up especially if autonomous centers of power and initiative are allowed to grow during the period of authoritarian rule...

...4) Coser adopts some of Max Weber's concepts in describing the evolution of capitalism in the West, and the requirements for economic development in the new nations...

...They should be the rationale of economic growth...

...Yet, their prospects cannot be assayed without examining those ties...

...But unless aided liberally by the West, the developing countries are exposed to the ever present danger of smothering in their own contradictions...

...it contributes little to an understanding of the actual course of the West's social evolution...

...Totalitarianism doesn't do away with these antagonisms, as Coser implies, but merely represses them...

...For democracy...

...I agree with him that some form of authoritarian regimes will most probably be the characteristic political feature of the New Nations in the near future...

...1. He thinks that I suggest that the leadership of the New Nations have unlimited freedom of choice, as to political and social alternatives of development...

...Madalyn E. Murray, Attorney Leonard J. Kerpelman told the court yesterday that a public school cannot have a "somewhat" religious practice or a "shade of religion...

...I tried to show that among the limited options open to them some form of authoritarianism was the most likely for the immediate period ahead, but that in the longer run other alternatives would open up...

...If, moreover, late starters are inhabited by a population which has acquired aspirations for material goods greater than its capacity to produce them, they may feel compelled to limit the expression of economic and political demands which threaten to draw resources away from growth...

...If time is of the essence, it is not easy to be indulgent with those individual foibles and idiosyncrasies that may seem to interfere with the collective needs of society...

...Coser advances a naive theory of pluralism in the liberal state...

...This in the long run may be the strongest bar to the extension of Communist regimes in the new states of the world...

...Coser, I believe, is too much impressed by the efficiency of Soviet-type totalitar ian regimes...

...Such measures have wrought irreversible changes whose effects probably can't be overcome without more coercion...

...What I have said so far explains my doubts about the prospects for democracy in the new states...

...Implying, as it does, that the foregone alternative is a possible option, the word "discard," I think, does not properly convey the fact that the liberal economic model cannot meet the development needs of the new states...

...In the spread of modern...

...Aware that the absence of an entrepreneurial middle class and the ideology associated with it has thus far aborted autonomous economic growth and impatient to break the hold of subsistence and tradition, they look to the state to mobilize the latent energies of their societies...

...If this is Coser's prediction, I concur...

...He said that Mrs...

...Furthermore, while the new states may adapt Soviet planning techniques to their special needs, they will be far from anxious to enter into any political relationships which jeopardize the independence so recently won from the Western imperialist nations...

...I should, however, like to em phasize somewhat more sharply the underlying forces which grip economically backward societies...

...But in the non-western world these circumstances are so unfavorable that they offer little scope for the play of individual initiative...

...They have been forced upon the bourgeoisie by crises which shook Western society to its foundations —two devastating wars, violent revolutions, the decline of its world dominance...

...Coser says, "The totalitarian model may be considered the antithesis of the liberal model...

...economic activity to new areas, coercion has commonly gone along" (ibid...

...Totalitarian societies," writes Coser, "destroy traditional social groups, communities, or self-contained classes...

...See also Report on The World Social Situation, United Nations, 1961...

...Can their traditions be expected to humanize economic development without fatally slowing it...

...2) His approach is limited to locating the groups or strata which initiate economic development in the new nations...

...The liberal state, in one form or other, harbored the seedlings of such regimes as Nazism in Germany, fascism in Italy, the Vichy regime and the Fifth Republic in France...

...The economic setting and class nature of the liberal order, which Coser chooses to ignore, was regarded as a bane on humanity by Owen, Sismondi, Marx, Engels, Proudhon, as well as a number of sensitive poets and novelists...

...Coser's liberal model, then, is a figment...

...The cards are stacked against a "democratic" development in the industrially backward nations...

...The political evolution of the developing countries hinges upon how well and rapidly they solve such problems as capital and skill shortages, and overpopulation...

...they are actors, not puppets...

...Weber's thesis cannot be used to explain, for example, the phenomenon of primitive accumulation (e.g., the seizure of Catholic Church property by the Tudors), nor even the many speculative ventures which spurred the rise of capitalism...

...Indeed so compelling is the analysis that one gets the impression Coser shrinks from its implications as if he had created a Frankenstein's monster...

...But then, it is not the first time that history has provided us with surprises...

...I take issue with Lewis Coser on the following major grounds: 1) He discusses the political evolution of the developing countries in isolation from their ties, past and present, with the West...

...but I question that a choice exists...

...In the United States, it owes its ever more problematical existence to vast investments in the cold war, economic as well as psychological in nature...

...Thus, Coser's positing of "choices" that the developing countries can make is an abstraction, attesting his good intentions, but clouding the issues...

...They can successfully oppose large-scale aid, or can impose their own terms in extending it...

...de Schweinitz's comments seem to me to supplement rather than to contradict what I had to say...

...Mr...

...How else explain the last paragraph in which he deprecates rigid determinism and suggests that after all new nations "can, if they so desire, deliberately create or at least permit the growth of a dispersed power structure in their countries...

...Antithesis suggests transformation...

...Alienation of native land for more effective utilization by Europeans was common in much of Africa and the Dutch East Indies...

...These matters being disposed of, what then are Brand's other complaints...

...So let me reassure him: I believe capitalism to be a Bad Thing, and imperialism an even Worse Thing...

...The monsoon climate of southeast Asia, the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa, and the tropical rain forests of sub-Sahara Africa and Brazil do not provide a congenial habitat for individual enterprise...

...If Brand wishes to argue however, that no choice exists at all then I can only say that this type of determinism is a metaphysical doctrine of dubious validity...

...This is a problematical contention...

...I ques tion that totalitarianism is a phenomenon sui generis, that it represents an identifiable political order like feudalism or the liberal state...

...how they deal with the disarray of their social order arising from, say, new technologies and urbanization...