HERE AND NOW
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society there is always the danger that the desperado exhausts himself
much sooner than he discomfits society, and then retires at the ripe
age of thirty and a half muttering about the sloth of the masses. Or
he may be crushed in the embrace of a society always on the look7,
out for interesting spectacles.
A far more serious and honorable version of this strategy is that
of absolute moral conscience, for example, that of the young people
who, while not religious, refuse the Vietnam war on moral grounds.
Their protest is to be respected.
If
they are simply bearing witness,
then nothing more need be said.
If,
however, it is claimed that they
stir other, more conventional and sluggish segments of the mass society
into response, we have abandoned the ground of moral absolutes
and moved to the slippery terrain of effectiveness and expediency-'
and then what they do must be scrutinized as a political tactic, open
to the problem of consequences both expected and unexpected. '
Liberal Pluralism.
This theory, associated with the name of
Daniel Bell, sees the society as a pluralist system in which competing
pressure groups - some reflecting socioeconomic interests and others,
refracting the aspirations of status groups - tacitly agree to abide
by the "rules of the game" and to submit their rival claims to the·
jurisdiction of technical experts. Superficially, this approach is congru–
ent with the one I have here outlined, insofar as it traces the effects
of political clash within a given society; fundamentally, it is divergent
from the approach I have taken, insofar as it accepts the society as
a given and fails to penetrate beneath political maneuver to the
deeper contradictions of social interest. Still, whether we like it or
not, this theory helps describe a good part of what has been happen–
ing in the United States these last few decades, especially when one
confines oneself to the local texture of political life. I think, however,
it is a theory inadequate on several counts:
• It
fails to consider sufficiently that within the society there
remain long-range economic and technological trends threatening the'
stability, perhaps the survival, of the pluralist system: that is, it
asserts a state of equilibrium too readily.
• It fails to recognize, as a rule, that even when the society is
operating at a high degree of efficiency and what passes for a notable
benevolence, it does not sufficiently satisfy human needs and instead
