Quotes 9

"The argument, in short, is that in a world of uncertainty, where probabilistic calculus is ruled out, rules, norms and institutions play a functional role in providing a basis for decision-making, expectation, and belief. Without these 'rigidities', without social routine and habit to reproduce them, and without institutionally conditioned conceptual frameworks, an uncertain world would present a chaos of sense data in which it would be impossible for the agent to make sensible decisions and act". Hodgson (1988:205)

Quotes 7

"The difficulty with the nineteenth-century conception of scarcity, which has carried over to the twentieth, is its definition of scarcity in physical terms; it was for this reason that abundance was counterposed to scarcity. But scarcity is not a zero-sum term of have or have-not. It is a measure of relative differences of preference at relative cost. In this sense the postulate of scarcity as an analytical concept underlies all of contemporary social science. It states axiomatically that all values are scarce relative to desires, that all resources are scare relative to wants. Economics deals with the allocation of scarce goods, political sociology with the regulation of competition among men for scarce values. To economize is to make the best use of limited resources among competing ends: the specification of the best mix of factors of production (at relative costs) with the most productive techniques (highest utilization) within the most effective scheduling (programming) of the flow of items; the outcome is the largest output at the least cost. For this reason the axial principle of economics is functional rationality. Political sociology is the study of the rules that regulate competition among men for wealth, power and esteem. But men have to accept these rules as fair and right if this competition is to proceed; men seek just authority. For this reason, the axial principle of political life is legitimacy."

***

"Politics, in contemporary society, is the management of social structure. It becomes the regulative mechanism of change. But any political decision necessarily involves some conception of justice, traditional, implicit, and now increasingly explicit. Men accept different principles of justice, or different hierarchies of value, and seek to embody them in social arrangements. Ultimately the differences between social systems lie not in their social structures (the arrangements of reward and privilege around the organization of the economy) but in their ethos. Capitalism was not just a system for the production of commodities, or a new set of occupations, or a new principle of calculation (though it was all of these), but a justification of the primacy of the individual and his self-interest, and of the strategic role of economic freedom in realizing those values through the free market. This is why the economic function became detached from other functions of Western society and was given free rein.

The political ethos of an emerging post-industrial society is communal, insofar as social goals and priorities are defined by, and national policy is directed to, the realization of those goals. It is socializing rather than economic, insofar as the criteria of individual utility and profit maximisation becomes subjected to broader considerations of social welfare and community interest."

Daniel Bell

Quotes 6

"If equality of result is to be the main object of social policy - and it is the heart of the populist reaction against meritocracy - it will demand an entirely new political agenda for the social systems of advanced industrial countries. But no such political demand can ultimately succeed - unless it imposed itself by brute force - without being rooted in some powerful ethical system, and for this reason the concept of equality of result has become the Archimedean point of a major new effort to provide a philosophical foundation - a conception of justice as fairness - for a communal society.

In the nature of human consciousness, a scheme of moral equity is the necessary basis for any social order; for legitimacy to exist, power must be justified. In the end, it is moral ideas - the conception of what is desirable - that shapes history through human aspirations. Western liberal society was "designed" by Locke, Smith, and Bentham on the premise of individual freedoms and the satisfaction of private utilities; these were the axioms whose consequences were to be realized through the market and later through the democratic political system. But that doctrine is crumbling, and the political system is now being geared to the realization not of individual ends but of group and communal needs. Socialism has had political appeal for a century now not so much because of its moral depiction of what the future society would be like, but because of material disparities within disadvantaged classes, the hatred of bourgeoisie society by many intellectuals, and the eschatological vision of a "cunning" of history. But the normative ethic was only implicit; it was never spelt out and justified. The claim for equality of result is a socialist ethic (as equality of opportunity is the liberal ethic), and as a moral basis for society it can finally succeed in obtaining men's allegiance not by material reward but by philosophical justification."

Daniel Bell (1974)

Quotes 5

"The difficulty with the exoteric argument of Illyich - as with so much of modernism - is that it confuses experience, in all its diversities, with knowledge. Experience has to be made conscious, and this is done, as Dewey remarked, "by means of that fusion of old meanings and new knowledge that transfigures both." 'Knowledge' is the selective ordering, and reordering of experience through relevant concepts. (Situational) Reality is not a bounded world, "out there", to be imprinted on the mind as from a mirror, or a flux of experience to be sampled for its novelties according to one's inclination (or its relevance for "me"), but a set of meanings organized by the mind, in terms of categories, which establishes the relations between facts and infers conclusions.

Nor need there be, in principle, a contradiction between a cognitive and an aesthetic mode in which, as alleged, the technocratic orientation is concerned only with the functional and the adversary culture with sensibility - much as this may be true in sociological fact. In the very nature of knowledge, as Dewey observed, there has to be an interplay between the two: the cognitive makes the variety of experience more intelligible by its reduction to conceptual form; the aesthetic makes experience more vivid by its presentation in an expressive mode. The two reinforce each other in a singular way.

What has to be common to both is a reliance on judgement - the making of neccessary distinctions and the creation of standards which allow one to sort out the meretricious from the good, the pretentious from the enduring. Knowledge is a product of the self-conscious and renewable comparison and judging of cultural objects and ideas in order to say that something is better than something else (or more complex, or more beautiful, or whatever the standard one seeks to apply), and that something is truer. Inevitably, therefore, knowledge is a form of authority, and education is the process of refining the nature of authoritative judgements. This is the classic, and enduring, rationale of education.

But to this is added a special burden of the post-industrial society. One need not defend the technocratic dimensions of education - its emphasis on specialization and vocationalism - to argue that schooling becomes more necessary than before. By the very fact that there are now many more differentiated ways in which people gain information and have experiences, there is a need for the self-conscious understanding of the processes of conceptualization as the means of organizing one's information in order to gain coherent perspectives on one's experience. A conceptual scheme is a set of consistent terms which groups together diverse attributes of experience or properties of an object, in a higher order of abstraction, in order to relate them to, or distinguish them from, other attributes and properties. To see what is common and what is different about modes of experience, is the function of education. And just as the resolution of identity crisis for individuals is the amalgamation of discordant aspects of growing up into a coherent whole, so is 'knowledge' an organization of experiences, tested against other patterns of experience, in order to create consistent standards of judgement.

The function of the university, in these circumstances, is to relate to each other the modes of conscious inquiry: historical consciousness, which is the encounter with a tradition that can be tested against the present; methodological consciousness, which makes explicit the conceptual grounds of inquiry and its philosophical presuppositions; and individual self-consciousness, which makes one aware of the sources of one's prejudgements and allows one to re-create one's values through the disciplined study of the society. Education is the "reworking" of the materials of the past, without ever wholly surrendering its truths or bending to its pieties. It is a continuing tension, the tension between past and future, mind and sensibility, tradition and experience, which for all its strains and discomforts, is the only source of maintaining the independence of inquiry itself. It is the affirmation of the principle of intellectual and artistic order through the search for relatedness of discordant knowledge."

Daniel Bell

Quotes 4

"Breaking out of an established framework of thinking or perceiving occurs in creating a theory or artistic object, yet it is not restricted to these; it is important to be able to "break frame" in our everyday lives also.

Sometimes the breaking of frame will be a direct action violating a previous framework of expectations that defined which actions were admissible or were allowed to occur, but which excluded the most functional actions or even effective ones.

The pieces of the frame - other's expectations, cultural traditions, our own habitual patterns of behavior resulting from past reinforcements, our own rules of thumb for acting - affect what range of choice we perceive, which alternatives are salient, which ones come to mind, which ones get excluded immediately, even whether we think we face a choice rather than simply a direction we must move in."

- Robert Nozick

1) Exploration begins from a framework, or "home base", of contours of significances and beliefs, and consists in the harmonic synthesis of new experiences, and therefore the reorganization of the meaningful interrelations among these frameworks, within the bounds of the affective and cognitive principles underlying the attachments to these frameworks. A three-level re-orientation takes place - phenomenology, belief, relation to principle.

2) Interestingly, while non-contradictory by necessity, these frameworks tend to be irreconcilable, and creative acts function to draw links between them that alters their place in a larger whole.

3) Rules of harmony differ according to the situational, and hence functional, context of the synthesis. Different principles reflect different approaches.

Quotes 3

"The secret of communicating with another person, I suspect, may be in communicating with who he thinks he is. Do that, and you can kid a great man and treat an insignificant one with deep respect. They'll credit you with insight."

Roger Ebert

Quotes 2

"Theoretical resources are always already distorted (esp. social, ie psychologically-based), and something of them fails to represent or capture adequately the world they take root in. The question is not merely how some ideas come to be possible in certain social conditions as if we were then explaining them away, but how to develop an analysis of how certains sets of concepts are put to work to grasp conditions that have reached points of impossibility, breaking points. We are really outlining the conditions of impossibility for how the theories were put together."

Quotes 1

"The essence of the authoritarian character has been described as the simultaneous presence of sadistic and moschistic drives. Sadism was understood as aiming at unrestricted power over another person more or less mixed with destructiveness; masochism as aiming at dissolving oneself in an overwhelmingly strong power and participating in its strength and glory. Both the sadistic and masochistic trends are caused by the inability of the isolated individual to stand alone and his need for a symbiotic relationship that overcomes this aloneness."

"Let us return now to the question which led us into this psychological analysis of selfishness. We found ourselves confronted with the contradiction that modern man believes himself to be motivated by self-interest and yet that actually his life is devoted to aims which are not his own; in the same way that Calvin felt that the only purpose of man's existence was to be not himself but God's glory. We tried to show that selfishness is rooted in the lack of affirmation and love for the real self, that is, for the whole concrete human being with all his potentialities. The “self” in the interest of which modern man acts is the social self, a self which is essentially constituted by the role the individual is supposed to play and which in reality is merely the subjective disguise for the objective social function for man in society. Modern selfishness is the greed that is rooted in the frustration of the real self and whose object is the social self. While modern man seems to be characterized by utmost assertion of the self, actually his self has been weakened and reduced to a segment of the total self – intellect and willpower – to the exclusion of all other parts of the total personality.

Even if this is true, has not the increasing mastery over nature resulted in an increased strength of the individual self? This is true to some extent, and inasmuch as it is true it concerns the positive side of the individual development which we do not want to lose track of . But although man has reached a remarkable degree of mastery over nature, society is not in control of the very forces it has created. The rationality of the system of production, in its technical aspects, is accompanied by the irrationality of our system of production in its social aspects. Economic crisis, unemployment, war, govern man's fate. Man has built his world; he has built factories and houses, he produces cars and clothes, he grows grain and fruit. But he has become estranged from the products of his own hands, he is not really the master any more of the world he has built; on the contrary, this man-made world has become his master, before whom he bows down, whom he tries to placate or manipulate as best he can. The work of his own hands has become his God. He seems to be driven by self-interest, but in reality his total self with all its concrete potentialities has become an instrument for the purposes of the very machine his hands have built. He keeps up the illusion of being the centre of the world, and yet he is pervaded by an intense sense of insignificance and powerlessness which his ancestors once consciously felt towards God."

Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom