No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2017
“If the mind is obligated to obey the word of command, it can at any rate feel that it is not free. But if it has been so manipulated beforehand that it obeys without even waiting for the word of command, it loses even the consciousness of enslavement.” All modern societies involve mass manipulation, especially now since the masses have become economically and politically important. Whether it is an election or merely a matter of consumption, the crucial factor is the behavior of the activated mass. Motivation research and public opinion polls are a way of gauging the anticipated reaction of the consumer and the voter. The asymmetry in decision-making between the masses and the businessman or the politician is thus diminished.
1 See Moore, Barrington Jr., Political Power and Social Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), chap. ii.Google Scholar
2 For a theoretical analysis of this relationship see William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1959).Google Scholar
3 For discussion see Etzioni, Amitai,“Authority Structure and Organizational Effectiveness,” Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. IV, No. 1 (1959)Google Scholar, as well as the following sources cited therein: Dubin, Robert, Human Relations in Administration (New York, 1951);Google Scholar Dalton, Melville,“Conflicts Between Staff and Line Managerial Officers,” American Sociological Review, Vol. XV, No. 3 (1950);Google Scholar Gouldner, A. W.,“Cosmopolitans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent Social Roles,” Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. II, No. 3 (1957) and No.4 (1958).Google Scholar
4 Armstrong, John A., The Soviet Bureaucratic Elite: A Case Study of the Ukrainian Apparatus (New York, 1959 Google Scholar); Granick, David, The Red Executive (New York, 1960).Google Scholar
5 I have tried elsewhere to define what I mean by ideology and in what way I think it affects the conduct of Soviet leaders. I will not therefore cover the same ground here. See chapter xvi of my The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), and“Communist Ideology and International Affairs,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, September, 1960.
6 It may be tentatively posited that the ideology-action generalizers at the apex are usually in a closer relationship to the ideologues than to the more subordinate experts. On lower levels, the party apparatchiki are usually in a closer relationship to agitprop than to the experts. (By closer relationship is meant less direct subordination of latter by former.) In revolutionary times (in early post-1917 Russia or even in China today) there tends to be a relative fusion between the ideology-action generalizers and the ideologues (symbolized by Lenin or Mao Tse-tung). With stability a process of differentiation took place, and in some respects the apparatchiki came closer to the experts. In recent years Khrushchev has been trying to counteract this process by stimulating increased activity by the agitprop and by assigning greater responsibility to the apparat, thus compensating for the necessarily greater importance oi the experts, given Soviet industrial-technical development.
7 One may add that an older example of the expression of the survival instinct of a goal-oriented movement through such organizational compulsion towards indoctrination and social integration is provided by church history.
8 By the former is meant that type of community which because of a continuous and often competitive interplay of groups is necessarily responsive to the impact of new ideas. New York and Paris are good metropolitan examples of actively receptive communities. By a passively receptive society is meant one which does not set up purposeful impediments to the inflow of new ideas.
9 The political experience of intellectual unrest in Hungary and Poland on the one hand and in China on the other might be relevant here. In the former it was closely associated with demoralization in the party and led to an eruption. In the latter it did not penetrate the party and the regime could quickly suppress it.
10 There might be an analogy here to the political history of religiously oriented societies. It was only after the Protestant and Catholic states learned to coexist with one another and, for that matter, with non-Christian states, that Protestants, Catholics, and others learned to live with one another within given states. An“interfaith council” in the United States is thus not only an example of conscious toleration but also of a decline in absolutist commitment.