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The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Ronald Inglehart
Ronald Inglehart*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan and University of Geneva
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Abstract

A transformation of basic political priorities may be taking place in Western Europe. I hypothesize: (1) that people have a variety of needs which are given high or low priority according to their degree of fulfillment: people act on behalf of their most important unsatisfied need, giving relatively little attention to needs already satisfied—except that (2) people tend to retain the value priorities adopted in their formative years throughout adult life. In contemporary Western Europe, needs for physical safety and economic security are relatively well satisfied for an unprecedentedly large share of the population. Younger, more affluent groups have been formed entirely under these conditions, and seem relatively likely to give top priority to fulfillment of needs which remain secondary to the older and less affluent majority of the population. Needs for belonging and intellectual and esthetic self-fulfillment (characterized as “post-bourgeois” values) may take top priorities among the former group. Survey data from six countries indicate that the value priorities of the more affluent postwar group do contrast with those of groups raised under conditions of lesser economic and physical security. National patterns of value priorities correspond to the given nation's economic history, moreover, suggesting that the age-group differences reflect the persistence of preadult experiences, rather than life cycle effects. The distinctive value priorities imply distinctive political behavior—being empirically linked with preferences for specific political issues and political parties in a predictable fashion. If the respective age cohorts retain their present value priorities, we would expect long-term shifts in the political goals and patterns of political partisanship prevailing in these societies.

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Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , December 1971 , pp. 991 - 1017
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1971

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Footnotes

*

The author is indebted to Samuel Barnes, Karl Deutsch, Kent Jennings, Warren Miller, Robert Putnam, and Donald Stokes for comments and criticism of an earlier draft of this article.

References

1 For a more complete presentation of this hypothesis, see Inglehart, Ronald, “Révolutionnarisme Post-Bourgeois en France, en Allemagne et aux États-Unis,” Il Politico, 36, 2 (1971) 209–238Google Scholar; and Ronald Inglehart and Leon Lindberg, “Political Cleavages in Post-Industrial Society: the May Revolt in France” (forthcoming).

2 An example of induced reversion to biological priorities, under starvation conditions, is described in Davies, James C., Human Nature and Politics (New York: Wiley, 1963), p. 13Google Scholar. A conscientious objector taking part in an experiment progressively lost his interest in social welfare work after a number of weeks on a semistarvation diet.

3 See Maslow, Abraham H., Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper, 1954)Google Scholar. An excellent discussion of value hierarchies and their political implications appears in Lane, Robert E., Political Thinking and Consciousness (Chicago: Markham, 1970)Google Scholar, Chapter 2.

4 Supporting evidence might be drawn from Richard Flacks' study of political activists and nonactivists among University of Chicago students. His findings indicate that students from relatively affluent homes tend to place greater emphasis on involvement in intellectual and esthetic pursuits, humanitarian considerations, and opportunities for self-expression, and they tend to de-emphasize material success, personal achievement, conventional morality, and religiosity; moreover, they are much more likely to become activists than students from less affluent backgrounds. See Flacks, Richard, “The Revolt of the Advantaged: An Exploration of the Roots of Student Protest,” Journal of Social Issues, 23 (1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See, among others, Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip, Miller, Warren and Stokes, Donald, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960)Google Scholar. Cf. Converse, Philip and Dupeux, Georges, “Politicization of the Electorate in France and the U.S.,” in Campbell, Anguset al., Elections and the Political Order (New York: Wiley, 1966)Google Scholar, Chapter 14.

6 This line of reasoning is presented in Ralf Dahrendorf, “Recent Changes in the Class Structure of European Societies”; and in Lipset, Seymour, “The Changing Class Structure and Contemporary European Politics,” both in A New Europe, ed., Graubard, Stephen (Boston: Beacon, 1967)Google Scholar.

7 Schumpeter, Joseph reasoned along somewhat similar lines in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942)Google Scholar.

8 See Inglehart, op. cit.

9 We distinguish between the modem middle class and the traditional middle class on the basis of occupation: the latter group consists of self-employed small businessmen and artisans; the former group comprises people with nonmanual occupations in the modern sector of the economy, and tends to be characterized by a higher level of economic security (and a lower likelihood of being attracted to extreme-Right political movements). Our use of this distinction was suggested by Lipset's, Seymour Martin analysis in Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City: Doubleday, 1960)Google Scholar, especially Chapter 5.

10 We are indebted to Jacques-René Rabier, directorgeneral of the European Community Information Service, for the role he has played in encouraging crossnational collaborative research with Michigan (and a number of other universities) over the past several years.

11 For a sophisticated discussion and application of this type of analysis, see Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain: Forces Shaping Electoral Choice (New York: St. Martin's 1969)Google Scholar, especially Chapters 3, 11 and 12. Butler and Stokes find that political party affiliation is a rather stable characteristic of British cohorts. In the relatively large swing from Conservative to Labour which took place from 1959 to 1963, they conclude, replacement of the electorate (linked with differential birth and mortality rates) actually played a larger role than did conversion of voters from one party to the other.

12 Fieldwork was carried out in February and March, 1970, by Louis Harris Research, Ltd. (London), Institut für Demoskopie (Allensbach), International Research Associates (Brussels), Netherlands Institut voor de Publieke Opinie (Amsterdam), Institut français d'opinion publique (Paris), and Institut per le Ricerche Statische e l'Analisi del'opinione Pubblica (Milan). The respective samples had N's of: 1975 (Britain), 2021 (Germany), 1298 (Belgium), 1230 (Netherlands), 2046 (France), and 1822 (Italy).

The survey also included Luxembourg, but the number of respondents from that country (335) was considered too small for use in the present analysis. The Dutch sample has been weighed to correct for sampling deficiencies, and the weighted N appears in the following tables; while the data from The Netherlands are, in the author's opinion, less reliable than those from the other countries, the crucial intra-sample differences discussed in this article are sufficiently large as to minimize the likelihood that they simply reflect sampling error. On the other hand, cross-national comparisons based on the Dutch marginals should be viewed with reservations. The surveys in the European Community countries were sponsored by the European Community Information Service; research in Great Britain was supported by funds from the University of Michigan.

13 From the viewpoint of most of our respondents, that is: in extreme situations, threats to domestic order can, of course, involve danger to one's life. To the extent that a concern with one's personal safety is involved, the item taps the need which Maslow places immediately below the economic needs in his hierarchy. Post-bourgeois responses, then, are seen as reflecting security in respect to both the economic and safety needs. There is reason to expect that the intergenerational pattern of priorities would be similar for the two types of needs: older cohorts are more likely to have experienced threats to their physical security, as well as to their economic security, during formative years. The persisting effect of the former experience is suggested by the fact that older Germans are more likely to express a fear of World War than are the post-war cohorts: see Merkl, Peter, “Politico-Cultural Restraints on West-German Foreign Policy,” Comparative Political Studies, 3 (January, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. We doubt that many of our respondents felt physically threatened in 1970, however; for most, this item probably evokes nothing more than thoughts of property damage.

We follow the Marxist tradition in according an important role to economic determination—although only within certain thresholds. Both before industrialization and after an industrial society reaches a threshold of general economic security, we believe that other values are likely to prevail more widely. The concept of discretionary income is analogous to our interpretation of the second threshold: as an economy rises well above the subsistence level, even specifically economic behavior can be explained by economic variables to a progressively diminishing extent.

14 Other high-loading items on this factor related to: expectations of a higher standard of living, support for student demonstrations, support for radical social change, and support for a variety of proposals for European integration (all of which had positive polarity); and emphasis on job security, pride in one's own nationality, and support for a strong national army (which had negative polarity). Because of limited funds, the British questionnaire was shorter than the one used in the European Community countries, and the factor analysis for that sample omits some of the items available in the larger data sets. Apart from these omissions, the British response pattern seems to parallel that found on the Continent. The fact that expectations of a higher future standard of living seem to go with giving a relatively low priority to economic security is interesting: it tends to confirm our interpretation that, for the post-bourgeois group, economic values are relatively unimportant because they are taken for granted.

15 This index was based on responses to the following items: “Supposing the people of Britain and the Common Market were asked to decide on the following questions. How would you vote …?

—Would you be in favor of, or against, the election of a European parliament by direct universal suffrage; that is, a parliament elected by all the voters in the member countries?

—Would you be willing to accept, over and above the (British) government, a European government responsible for a common policy in foreign affairs, defense and the economy?

—If a President of a United States of Europe were being elected by popular vote, would you be willing to vote for a candidate not of your own country, if his personality and programme corresponded more closely to your ideas than those of the candidates from your own country?”

A respondent was categorized as “clearly for” European integration if he gave favorable responses to all three of these items; or to at least two of them provided that his response to the third item was “don't know,” rather than “against.” For a much more detailed exploration of this topic, see my article “Changing Value Priorities and European Integration,” Journal of Common Market Studies, September, 1971Google Scholar.

16 There is a certain similarity between the configuration of “post-bourgeois” preferences and the wellknown concept of “authoritarianism.” Both concepts relate to the priorities one gives to liberty, as opposed to order. And—as we have just seen—the libertarian position seems linked with internationalism. This follows from the fact that, according to our analysis, the post-bourgeois groups have attained security in regard to both the safety and sustenance needs; insofar as the nation-state is seen as a bulwark protecting the individual against foreign threats, it is less important to post-bourgeois respondents. They have, moreover, a larger amount of “venture capital,” psychically speaking, available to invest in projects having an intellectual and esthetic appeal—such as European unification. There are both theoretical and empirical differences between our position and that prevailing in the authoritarianism literature. We emphasize a process of historically-shaped causation which is not necessarily incompatible with, but certainly takes a different focus from, the psychodynamics of authoritarianism. Empirically, authoritarianism, like acquisitive value priorities, tends to be linked with lower economic status. By contrast, there are indications that children and youth tend to be more authoritarian than adults. (Stouffer, however, reported evidence of sizeable agegroup differences among adult groups in degree of “Tolerance for Non-Conformity,” with young adults far more tolerant than older adults; he sees the evidence as reflecting both life-cycle and intergenerational effects. See Stouffer, Samuel, Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties [New York: Doubleday, 1955], p. 89Google Scholar). In any event, neither previous explorations nor the present surveys revealed reasonably strong or consistent relationships between standardized F-scale items and the attitudes reported here. The two concepts seem related, but items which served as indicators of authoritarianism in earlier research appear to have limited applicability in the Europe of the 1970's. For a report of an earlier cross-national exploration of authoritarianism and internationalism, see Inglehart, Ronald, “The New Europeans: Inward or Outward Looking?” International Organization, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Winter, 1970), pp. 129–139CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The literature on authoritarianism is immense; the classic work is Adorno, Theodor W., et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950)Google Scholar; Cf. Christie, Richard and Jahoda, Marie, eds., Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality” (Glencoe: Free Press, 1954)Google Scholar.

17 It is difficult to interpret the cross-national pattern as a reaction to current events within the respective nations. There is considerable evidence of a recent law-and-order reaction in the face of student disorders in each of these countries. But if the cross-national differences were largely the result of such a reaction, we would expect to find the emphasis on order to be greatest in France (where the recent upheaval was greatest) and weakest in Britain (which has had the smallest amount of domestic disorder). The data manifestly fail to fit this pattern; we must explain them in terms of predispositions anterior to, rather than resulting from, the recent domestic disorders these countries have experienced.

18 Interestingly, this shift corresponds to the transition from the purportedly apolitical youth of the 1950's—the “Skeptical Generation” or “Uncommitted Youth,” as they were called—to the relatively radical youth of the 1960's.

19 This analysis is similar to a multiple regression analysis, using dummy variables. For an explanation of the technique, see Sonquist, John A., Multivariate Model Building: the Validation of a Search Strategy (Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, 1970)Google Scholar.

20 Granting that this is the process at work, we must ask why this elite political culture gives relatively high priority to expressive values; one is tempted to draw on relative economic security to supply at least part of the answer. As is pointed out later in this section, however, higher education does not seem to be inherently linked with a libertarian political position; at other points in history, it has been associated with relatively authoritarian and conservative positions.

21 Other possibilities also exist:

(1) It could be due to sampling error. We believe the latter possibility can be excluded, however: we have found a similar age-group pattern in all seven of the European surveys cited thus far; moreover, we have examined responses to items from a large number of American surveys which, implicitly or openly, ask the individual to choose between political liberties and threats to order or national security. A similar agegroup pattern occurs in virtually all of them. See, for example, Gaudet, Hazel, “The Polls: Freedom of Speech,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 34 (Fall, 1970)Google Scholar. The same pattern occurs in responses to comparable items in the S.R.C. 1968 presidential election survey. The likelihood of finding such a pattern in so many surveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sampling error appears negligible.

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differential birth rates or life-expectancies among social groups having distinctive value priorities. These would tend to give the group having the higher birth rate (or shorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strong representation among the younger cohorts. Empirically, lower income groups tend to have had higher birth rates and shorter life expectancies than upper income groups over recent decades (For example, see Butler and Stokes, op. cit., pp. 265–270). But lower income groups are relatively likely to express acquisitive value priorities. Despite this fact, postbourgeois values are relatively widespread among the younger cohorts!

22 (Chicago: Markham Publishing Company, 1969).

23 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968).

24 The Greening of America (New York: Random House, 1970)Google Scholar.

25 See, for example, Shirer, William L., The Collapse of the Third Republic (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969), pp. 201–223Google Scholar.

26 Among the reasons for this decline in activity, the fact that some concessions were made to some of the student demands is probably the most obvious factor, but I suspect that its importance is overrated. Another reason is that major political confrontations along the acquisitive/post-bourgeois dimension are likely to be counterproductive for the latter group under current conditions: the acquisitives still seem to hold a heavy numerical predominance—as became increasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by the end of the 1960's. Still another factor seems pertinent in America: the economic recession of 1970 may have drawn greater attention to economic considerations on the part of groups which had previously given them little notice. The conventional wisdom holds that economic troubles tend to help the traditional Left; paradoxically (but in keeping with our analysis of intergenerational change) we would expect them to tend to undermine the New Left.

27 Except among the youngest cohort, we do not have a large enough number of university-educated respondents to permit reliable estimates of the responses of those who actually have university educations. Within the youngest cohort, we do have at least 30 student respondents from four of our six countries; they tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois than other members of their age group and socioeconomic stratum, but only moderately so: they are, on the average, four percentage points less acquisitive and seven points more post-bourgeois than their peers in Table 11. This suggests that it is not principally the university milieu which accounts for their value priorities (although this seems to play a part) but the fact that the students are from the youngest and most affluent social categories.

28 In their analysis of British panel survey data gathered in 1963, 1964 and 1965, Butler and Stokes, op. cit., pp. 58–59, comment:

A theory of political ‘senescence’ as it is sometimes called, fits comfortably the more general belief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberal or radical, while those of age are conservative. … In the 1960's Conservative strength tended to be weakest among those born in the 1920's and just before. Electors younger than this tended actually to be a little more Conservative than those who lay within the precincts of early middle age. This irregularity, although an embarrassment to any simple theory of conservatism increasing with age, can readily be reconciled with the concept that the conservation of established political tendencies is what increases with age … we must ask not how old the elector is but when it was that he was young.

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis based on data at the elite level, see Putnam, Robert D., “Studying Elite Political Culture: the Case of ‘Ideology,’” American Political Science Review, 65 (September, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Putnam finds evidence of significant intergenerational changes in basic political style among British and Italian politicians.

29 Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeable shift to the Right from 1967 to 1968, within a panel of respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years. After re-interviewing these respondent a third time, they report that more than 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 was preserved in 1969. See Converse and Pierce, , “Basic Cleavages in French Politics and the Disorders of May and June, 1968,” paper presented at the 7th World Congress of Sociology, Varna, Bulgaria, September, 1970Google Scholar.

30 In the Italian case, however, the Communist party also seems to enjoy a relative preference within the post-bourgeois constituency: the PCI and PSIUP combined are supported by seven per cent of the acquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeois group (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightly greater proportion of support from the post-bourgeois group than from the acquisitives). It appears, then, that members of our Italian sample react to the PCI almost as if it were a New Left party—an interesting finding, in view of the fact that support for the French Communist party does not show a similar pattern; one wonders if the PCF cut itself off from postbourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt.

31 This ordering of priorities is, of course, not new in itself. Weber and Veblen, among others, called attention to the disdain for economic striving and an emphasis on distinctive life styles among economically secure strata throughout history. Veblen interprets the anti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as an attempt to protect their superior status by excluding individuals rising from lower economic levels. See Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Modern Library, 1934)Google Scholar. It is highly dubious whether this interpretation applies to the contemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole. Its members appear universalistic in outlook and sometimes seem to imitate the life-style of lower strata. Conspicuous consumption seems to play a relatively small role in their behavior—unless we interpret going barefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous consumption. We would view needs for intellectual and esthetic self-realization as political motivations in themselves. Concern for pollution of the environment and the despoiling of its natural beauty—issues which played a minor political role until quite recently—have suddenly become prominent, with the emergence into political relevance of the current youth cohorts. These concerns may be justified in terms of self preservation (“We are about to suffocate beneath an avalanche of garbage”) but this argument may be somewhat hyperbolic: I suspect that behind this new wave of protest, there may be a heightened sensitivity to the esthetic defects of industrial society. It seems clear that other factors are also involved in the emergence of a New Left: situational factors unique to a given movement in a given society. I will not attempt to deal with them in this cross-national analysis.

32 The linkage between church and party is most explicit on the Continent, but the British Conservative Party is no exception to this pattern: affiliation with the Established Church of England is strongly linked with preference for the Conservative Party. Even when wo control for social class, the Anglicans in our sample are more likely to favor the Conservative Party than are members of minority faiths or nonreligious respondents, by a margin of nearly 20 percentage points. The more frequently one attends the Anglican Church, moveover, the more likely one is to support the Conservatives.

33 The reduced number of cases is due to the fact that here we are dealing only with those respondents:

1. Who have a political party preference—which they are willing to disclose; and

2. Whose parents had a political party preference—which was known by the respondent.

34 See Jennings, M. Kent and Niemi, Richard G., “The Transmission of Political Values from Parent to Child,” The American Political Science Review, 62 (March, 1968), pp. 169–184CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Calculated from Seymour M. Lipset, op. cit., Chapter V, Table IV. Our comparison focuses on the two more dynamic groups of industrial society—the workers, on one hand, and the modern middle class on the other hand. Although the principle is similar, our measure of class voting, therefore, is not identical with that used by Alford, Robert R. in Party and Society (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1962)Google Scholar. The traditional middle class, as a stagnant or declining element in the economy, has not shown a change comparable to that which apparently has taken place among the modern middle class; combining these two groups (as Alford does) dampens the effect we are describing.

36 See Abramson, Paul R., “The Changing Role of Social Class in Western European Politics,” Comparative Political Studies (July, 1971)Google Scholar. Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan argue that “the party systems of the 1960's reflect, with but few significant exceptions, the cleavage structures of the 1920's”; see Lipset, and Rokkan, , Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (New York: The Free Press, 1967), p. 50Google Scholar. On the other hand, Lipset reports some data which seem to indicate a decline in class voting among the American electorate from 1936 to 1968: see Lipset, , Revolution and Counter-Revolution: Change and Persistence in Social Structure (New York: Basic Books, 1968), Table 8–2, pp. 274–275Google Scholar. A change in degree, if not in type of cleavage, seems to be taking place.

37 See Dennis, and McCrone, , “Preadult Development of Political Party Identification in Western Democracies,” Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (July, 1970), pp. 243–263CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This evidence confirms earlier findings: see Philip E. Converse and Georges Dupeux in Campbell et al., Elections and the Political Order; cf. Converse, Philip E., “Of Time and Partisan Stability,” Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (July, 1969), pp. 139–171CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the latter two articles, Converse (and Dupeux) report that individuals who knew their father's party affiliation are more likely to identify with a party themselves than are those whose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning party identification. If citizens with a clear political party identification are relatively unlikely to shift their vote according to underlying values, Table 14 may give a conservative estimate of the impact of value priorities on party choice: the table deals exclusively wiih those who report a definite party choice themselves and received party preference cues from their parents. In addition, however, Converse finds (in “Of Time and Partisan Stability”) that older cohorts tend to have relatively strong attachments to given political parties, as a function of the number of years they have been eligible to vote for the political party of their choice in free elections. This suggests the possibility that at least part of the relationship between value preference and party shift may be due to the greater liklihood of older respondents having “acquisitive” values and relatively strong party loyalties. This hypothesis might be tested by controlling for age, in addition to the other controls in Table 14. When we do so, the relationship between value preferences and party shift does not seem to disappear, but the highly skewed relationship between age and values reduces the number of cases in some of the cells to the vanishing point. We can apply another sort of test, however, based on cross-national comparisons. Our 1968 data from Britain, France and Germany contain information about the strength of party identification. The pattern varies a good deal from country to country. In the British sample (where the present party system has been established for nearly half a century) intense partisan identification falls off regularly and sharply, as we move from oldest to youngest age group. The oldest British group contains four times as many strong partisan identifiers as does the youngest group. Intense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeply in the German sample (strong identifiers occurring twice as frequently among the oldest group as among the youngest group). So far, this is entirely consistent with the pattern reported by Converse. The French data, however, fit Converse's model only if we regard the present French party system as newly established: partisanship decreases only very slightly in the French sample, as we move from old to young. French teenagers are almost as likely to declare themselves strong partisans as are the 60-year-olds! While at other age levels the French are least likely of the three nationalities to express a strong sense of party identification, among this youngest group they show the highest proportion. The relationship between intergenerational party shift and underlying value priorities noted in our French sample cannot readily be attributed to the older cohorts' relatively strong attachment to existing political parties—yet value-linked intergenerational party shift seems to occur to a greater extent in France than in any of the other national samples.

38 Even relatively affluent English workers are likely to remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party, according to Goldthorpe, John H., Lockwood, David, Beckhofer, Frank and Platt, Jennifer: see The Affluent Worker: Political Attitudes and Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1968)Google Scholar. Richard F. Hamilton argues that the same was true of French workers during the Fourth Republic; he may be correct in regard to that period, but our data indicate that the pattern has changed significantly during the Fifth Republic. See Hamilton, , Affluence and the French Worker in the Fourth Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 At first glance, the assumption of intracohort stability may seem unrealistic: adult change does take place. But, for reasons indicated above, it would probably be rash to assume that the adult cohorts will necessarily become more acquisitive as they age. In view of the uncertainty of the direction of possible shifts within adult cohorts, the assumption of intracohort stability may provide at least a useful first approximation.

40 These findings seem to contradict some key projections in the literature which focuses on analysis of the future. Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener, for example, contend that:

There is a basic, long-term multifold trend toward:

1. Increasingly sensate (empirical, this-worldly, secular, humanistic, pragmatic, utilitarian, contractual, epicurean or hedonistic) cultures.

2. Bourgeois, bureaucratic, “meritocratic,” democratic (and nationalistic) elites. …

My reading of the data implies that, while these trends may have prevailed until recently, certain aspects may be undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societies. Specifically, I doubt that the elites of these societies will become increasingly bourgeois, meritocratic or nationalistic; or that these cultures are likely to become increasingly pragmatic or utilitarian. Kahn and Wiener make a number of additional projections which do strike me as likely to hold true; see The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 7Google Scholar.

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