PARTISAN REVIEW
259
industrial revolution and the mechanisms of economic self-regulation
designed to replace the liberal regulation of the market which had
been virtually abolished by industrial monopolization. These tech–
nical and economic transformations took place within traditional
legal and political social relations, which had been modified in a
deeply authoritarian and managerial way. And modification without
legal and institutional change was possible because it was accepted
by a generation, mostly over forty, who felt it satisfied its most im–
portant need, the need for greater income and security.
But the realization of those objectives, taken for granted by a
new generation, would sooner or later make the authoritarian man–
agerial relations which arose from the exclusive need to augment
productivity seem less and less rational. For the richer a society,
the more important are culture, liberty and personal authenticity, as
against sheer efficiency and production of goods. In addition, a new
class, the strata of skilled workers, technicians and specialists, would
become dissatisfied with the one-dimensional role of well-paid ex–
ecutors. To make decisions more democratic they will demand that
social relations be geared to the new technical and economic struc–
ture of society. They will ask for self-management - and a term
which before May 1968 was known only to a small number of intel–
lectuals and students, became in a few weeks a slogan of all salaried
workers in France. At that point, it became evident that what had
appeared to theoreticians as a period of stabilization and equilibrium
was only a phase in the adjustment of Western industrial societies
to the second industrial revolution, and that it had been superceded.
The concrete forms of these first symptoms of opposition still
have to be analyzed, particularly the split, characteristic of all social
upheavals that open the way for a new era, between the conscious–
ness and the actual behavior of the actors. And why did these up–
heavals manifest themselves first among students, and why were
they so intense and widespread in France? Again, I cannot go into
all this here. But I should mention in passing one process ignored
by positivist sociology: the transformation of the function and the
nature of the French university.
Liberal society was marked by a duality in social relations: it
was authoritarian, almost monarchical in business, and democratic
and egalitarian in the market, as well as in the economic, political,
