THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION
189
Through the new economic structure, as we already see from the
examples of Russia and Germany, mass unemployment can be
done away with, capital funds released from idleness, foreign trade
carried on (by, for example, barter methods) at what would be an
intolerable loss for capitalism, exploitation of backward territories
and peoples resumed and stepped up, and the
capitalist
type of
economic crisis eliminated. What is in question here is not whether
we approve of the means whereby these ends are achieved (we
might, from a moral standpoint, prefer unemployment to state
labor camps), but merely the observation that they are achieved.
They are achieved, moreover, not through the cleverness of indi–
vidual leaders, but through new institutional arrangements which
remove the private profit requirements that have brought a dying
capitalism to mass unemployment, idle funds and dried-up trade.
There is thus every reason to believe that the achievements are not
episodic, but a consequence of the newly rising structure of society.
Within any society, primary social power is in general held
by those persons who have the chief measure of control over the
instruments of production. Nevertheless, in the political order,
power or "sovereignty" cannot simply float in the air; it must be
concretized or "localized" in some definite human institution which
is recognized and accepted by the given society as the body from
which laws, decrees, and rules properly issue. There is a natural
enough tendency for each rnajor structure of society to develop its
own typical sort of institution to
se~e
this function of the localiza–
tion of sovereignty. All historians recognize the great symptomatic
importance of what might be described as the "shift in the localiza
tion of sovereignty" which occurs as a phase of every social transi–
tion (revolution). As the old order decays, sovereignty departs
from the institution where it has been localized, and comes to rest
in
a new type of institution which, though it exists as a rule within
the old order, is there secondary in influence and in reality repre–
sentative of the new order that is on its way up.
Under capitalism, political sovereignty has been most typi–
cally "localized" in parliaments (or some similar sort of institu–
tion, by whatever name it may have been called). Parliaments
have been the "law-makers" of capitalism. During the generation
since the first world war, sovereignty has been quickly shifting
away from parliaments, and in most nations today parliamentary
