Part T w o

Charisma, Ritual, a n d C o n s e n s u s

* * &

Primordial, Personal, a n d Civil T i e s

Sacred,

i What sociologists and social anthropologists call the cultural value or belief system of a society can be lived up to only partially, fragmentarily, intermittently and only in an approximate way. The ideals of prophets and saints can take root only when they are attenuated, moderated and compromised with other contradictory ideals and with the demands of the situation and the needs of "the old Adam." Ideals and beliefs can only influence conduct alongside of personal ties, primordial attachments, and responsibilities in corporate bodies, and they can come into play primarily in the form of vague notions regarding the right and good in concrete forms. Sociologists and anthropologists might make it appear as if every man is implicitly a philosopher and a theologian with a coherent image of the cosmos and society and a hierarchy of standards of preference. This is, however, very far from the truth. Man is much more concerned with what is near at hand, with what is present and concrete, than with what is remote and abstract He is more responsive on the whole to persons, to the status of those who surround him and the justice which he sees in his own situation, than he is to the symbols of remote persons, to the total status system in the society and to the global system of justice. Immediately present authorities engage his mind more than remote ones. The ordinary man is, however, not a complete idiot in the Greek sense. In a dormant way, semiconscious and peripheral, he too responds to the central authorities and symbols of the society. From time to time, as occasion requires, he comes more closely into contact with them; his consciousness is opened to them at election / time, in times of national troubles, on great ceremonial occasions like the Coronation, in the same way in which an "Easter and Christmas" communicant enters into communion with divinity on these two great annual occasions, at his wedding, at the christening of his children, on the occasion of the death of a kinsman, a family member, or a close friend. For the rest of the time, the ultimate values of the society, what is sacred to its members, are suspended amidst the distractions of concrete tasks, which makes the values ambiguous and thus gives freedom for individual innovation, creation, and adaptation. Those who, because of the needs of their personalities and the driving Previously published in a slightly different form in the British Journal of Sociology, vol. 8 (1957), pp. 130-45.

T 112 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus force of their reason, come into contact with the symbols of the ultimate in the cosmos or in the sphere of justice and morality are impatient with existing tradition, regardless of whether they are "progressive" or seek to revive ancient virtues and "the good old times." They are impatient with anything less than wholehearted commitment to the ideal as they see it. That is why the ideologist, be he prophet or revolutionary, is affronted by the ordinary man's attachment to his mates, to his pub, to his family, to his petty vanities, to his job, to his vulgar gratifications, to his concern for the improvement of his conditions of life. That is also why the ideologist dislikes the politician, who aspires to do no more than to help keep things running and to make piecemeal changes, and, of course, the businessman, the manager, the technologist who works on a limited front Nonetheless, the work of keeping society going at all times except moments of extreme crisis is the achievement of the workman at his task, the manager in his plant, the administrator bound by red tape, the father and mother in their family circle, a man among his friends, the expert at his narrow job; in brief, it is the achievement which follows from each person concerning himself with his task and his relationships as they exist around him. As I see it, modern society is no lonely crowd, no horde of refugees fleeing from freedom. It is no Gesellschaft, soulless, egotistical, loveless, faithless, utterly impersonal and lacking any integrative forces other than interest or coercion. It is held together by an infinity of personal attachments, moral obligations in concrete contexts, professional and creative pride, individual ambition, primordial affinities, and a civil sense which is low in many, high in some, and moderate in most persons. It might be destroyed by modern warfare; or the exhaustion of its resources, the lack of initiative of its inventors and enterprisers might so hurt its competitive position in the economic world that it would be doomed to the pressure of a standard of living below what its members aspire to. Aside from these, it is in no danger of internal disintegration. Whatever danger it faces in this respect would be far less from those who are charged with faithlessness and the inability to rise above their routine concerns, from the philistines, the dwellers in housing estates and new towns, than from those who think that society needs a new faith to invigorate it and give it a new impulse. These remarks on some of the bonds which hold a large-scale society together have emerged from a long process of research and analysis, a process which began long before I was born and which will go on for a long time after the appearance ofiove. Belief, and Civility, in which my own efforts to contribute to the process are contained. When I was asked to speak about the relationships of theory and research, I decided to make my analysis as concrete as possible, especially since the actually subsisting relationships are often obscured and falsified by an excessively schematic, excessively orderly picture. In order to be as concrete as possible I am Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties 113 reporting on my own experience of this relationship between research and theory; it is not because I think thatriiyexperience is more profound or more important than that of other workers in our disciplines that I have chosen this autobiographical form, but because I know it best I think that I can best observe the often slovenly, often haphazard, and often unconscious elements in the relationship of theory and research by scrutinizing my own experience. II In 1887, in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Tonnies contrasted modern Western society, or Gesellschaft, which he saw as expediential, atomized, rationalistic, and individualistic, with a state of very intense solidarity, in which individuality was kept in a rudimentary state and which he called Gemeinschaft. He saw instances of Gemeinschaft in extended families residing together, guilds, village communities, tribal societies, etc. These were all highly integrated, i.e., they had a high degree of conformity of action with expectations and the expectations covered a wide range of the actions of their members. After leaving T6nnies's hands, the notion of Gemeinschaft underwent a considerable extension which made explicit some of the implications of Tonnies's notion. A state of intense solidarity with highly affective overtones, even where the strong emotions did not always find direct expression, became one of the major variables in the analysis of social structure. Simmel, in. his stress on the extremely individualistic, tradition-destroying forces of modern urban society, was in the same tradition. Durkheim, who was influenced by Comte's image of a society destroyed by rationalistic negativism and individualism, in seeking to establish a contrast with the disintegrated condition of modern Western society, focussed his attention on the same phenomenon as Tonnies, i.e. mechanical solidarity. \ On the other side of the ocean, Charles Cooley, just after the turn of the century, and apparently without any connection with either Tonnies's or Durkheim's writings, fastened his attention on the same phenomenona state of intense and comprehensive solidarity in a relatively small group in which there is opportunity for direct interaction and a very pronounced feeling of "we-ness" in which "individualities have been fused." Neighborhoods, families, the play groups of children were called "primary groups." Like Tonnies, Cooley intended to contrast the disagreeable, selfish, conflictful aspects of modern society with the ethos of the primary group. Like Tonnies, Cooley thought that the larger society could take its ethos from the rules of life of the small, intensely bound group; he used the term "primary" because he believed that their "primary" nature lay in the fact that in such groups the higher ideals which could govern conduct in the larger society were formed. The primary group became one of the major interests of American

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Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties 115 relatively unmediated experience of contact with the sacred. Max Weber had gone further than Schmalenbach inasmuch as he saw that the Bund-like religious body, the charismatic Sect, was disruptive of the civil order. He had also in his famous distinction between Gesinnungsethik and Verantwortungsethik, which paralleled the distinction between sect and church, laid the foundations of the distinction between ideological and civil politics. But the foundations were not built upon by Max Weber in his theory of social structure, and they were not perceived by other workers in the same and neighboring fields. I had read all these writers in the 1930s and failed to draw them into systematic relation with one another., I had been a fairly conscientious student of the Communist and Nazi movements, but except for the abduction of the term "charisma" in an effort to describe the Nazi party in 1938 (before this became the fashion) and my awareness that the Nazis were enamored of Gemeinschaft-like ideas, my theoretical "knowledge" lay unused. In this period, I also read with great interest Lenin's What Is To Be Done and noted his complaint that the working class, if left to itself, would not become revolutionary but would content itself with small improvements in its immediate situation; he had said that except for the active work of full-time professional revolutionaries, no revolution could take place. I utterly failed to see at this time the conceptual parallel of Lenin's distinction between economistic trade unionism and the professional revolutionary, Max Weber's more general distinction between Alltag (routine) and charisma, and Weber's distinction between church and sect It was some years before I perceived that Lenin and Weber were discussing with a frightful urgency the function of one type of primary group in the social system. In 1941 I began some inquiries among groups of xenophobic natiyists and Nazi sympathizers in Chicago. In my interviews with these zealots, and in my reading of their correspondence and publications, I was impressed by their passion for solidarity, their insistence on absolute loyalty of their members to the organization, and their paranoid anxiety about the backsliding propensities of their fellow members. They tended to refer every event in their personal affairs and in the larger world to the principles which they and their comrades sought to serve. In the incoherent farrago of the leaders of these groups, I discerned a set of themes: first, a dualistic conception of the world in which light fought against darkness, good against evil, Protestants against everyone else, Christians against everyone else, Americans (the same as Christians) against everyone else, everyone else against Jews and foreigners, in an unceasing war for the destiny of the world; second, the need for unbreakable solidarity; third, a conviction of the permanently persistent efforts of the enemy to penetrate the organization of the children of light; fourth, closely connected ^therewith, a fear of the untrustworthiness of their comrades. To some extent they had assimilated the Nazi ideology

sociology in the period up to the beginning of the great depression and the accession to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany. W. I. Thomas and Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and other American writers referred to the.family, the play group, the boys' gang, the tightly knit village community, the neighborhood, as primary groups, all of whichwith the exception of the boys' gangthey believed were being increasingly eroded by the individualism, the growth of rationality and large-scale organization, and the dissolution of moral consensus of American urban society. The late Professor Louis Wirth's essay "Urbanism as a Way of Life" stated in extreme form the contrast between the moral solidarity of the primary group, and the anomic individualism, unrestrained by common moral standards, characteristic of modern urban society. In 1935 Elton Mayo published The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, and not long after that T. N. Whitehead published Leadership in a Free Society. Both of these writers stressed the "impoverishment of social relations" in the modern factory, by which they meant the absence of strong personal attachments of the workers and staff with each other. They derived all sorts of distressing consequences such as class conflict, industrial inefficiency, and the like. (Neither wrote with any indication ofawareness of Cooky's, Simmers, or Tbnnies's writings on the same subject.) In the early 1920s Professor Hermann Schmalenbach, in an essay "Die soziologische Kategorie des Bundes" (in Die Dioskuren, vol. 1), introduced a new note into the analysis of Gemeinschaft Instead of using it to heighten the description of the individualism and moral dissensus of modern society, he analysed the concept itself and discovered that it covered a diversity of phenomena, which truth required to be separated from each other. He saw that it was possible for a state of intense and comprehensive solidarity to exist without those who shared it possessing either a common territory of origin and residence, a common place of work, or ties of blood .and sexual connection. When these primordial elements were isolated from the. original concept of Gemeinschaft, the residue was a Bund, for which such terms as confraternity, brotherhood, league, band, gang, are all poor translations but each of which brings to the fore the element of intense mutual attachment, independent of primordial ties. Schmalenbach's ideas were not taken up by other German sociologists, and they remained utterly unknown in the English-speaking world. Nonetheless, I think that Schmalenbach's essay was the first stage in the turning away from the uncritical contrast of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, or primary group and the atomized large-scale society. Before Schmalenbach, Max Weber had expounded an analysis, mostly by definition and classification, of the kindred phenomenon of the charismatic circle of prophet and apostles, and the corresponding conception of the sect as body membership, which is a function of the state of mind of the members. The qualifying state of mind was possession by an intense

; | lit II "i ! ' i '!'' il 11 B ' J H i III

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Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties 117 masculinity, the tenderness taboo, the positive appreciation of discipline as a curb on the innere Schweinhund, of which I was made very acutely aware. At that time, however, they did not fit readily into my scheme of analysis of the nature of the military primary group, and so they lay, noticed but unused. I saw how the soldier's attachment to his comrades and to the group which they formed held in check his own self-regarding impulses to protect the integrity of his own skin regardless of consequences, and how this attachment caused him to accept obligations and expectations when otherwise he might be remiss. The discovery that the primary groupby the stiffening and fortification of weaklings and laggards through example, encouragement, and protective affection influenced military effectiveness was enough at that stage to set my mind at rest. In 1944,1 drafted an elaborate interview schedule which was then used by the interrogators of PWD/SHAEF, with modifications, until the end of the war. (In this work I had the collaboration of Dr. Dicks and Morris Janowitz.) When the war was over, I analysed the material which had been gathered by the interrogators. In the course of this analysis, I realized that Elton Mayo, Whitehead, and Rothlisberger, in their studies of industrial morale, had been investigating exactly the same thing as I discovered in my studies of the German army. They too discovered the influence of small, closely knit groups on the conduct of their members in the performance of tasks set them from the outside. If I may place my own work at the end of a line of development which ran from Tbnnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, I would summarize it as follows: first: Tonnies described a single complex variable: Gemeinschaftcontaining many heterogeneous elementsand described the ethos and structure of modern society in a way which excluded Gemeinschaft in principle; second: Cooley asserted that the ethos of the primary groupcould be and often was adopted as the ethos of the public life of the larger society; third: Max Weber, followed by Schmalenbach, distinguished the elements of intense and comprehensive attachment in Gemeinschaft from the primordial, ecological, and biological bases with which they were merged in Ttmnies's idea of Gemeinschaft; then Max Weber in his analysis of the tension between charismatic authority and the traditional and rational-legal types of authority disclosed another facet of the relationship between ethos of certain types of primary groups and the working of the larger society; and most important Weber, by his intimation of the seed of charisma at the root of the rational-legal and traditional types of authority, provided the distinction between intense and moderate attachments to the ultimate values; fourth: Mayo perceived the dependence of the functioning of corporate bodies on the morale of primary groups; fifth: my own observations before and during the war singled out (a) the affinity between political or ideological enthusiasm and a tendency to organize into primary groups; (b) the

from their German-American associates; they were also the heirs of the ideology which the Dearborn Independent and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion expounded and which was in the air of the Middle West throughout the 1920s and 1930s. I got the impression, however, that if the culture of nativist extremism had not been there, my interviewees would have generated it themselves. Many of them were unsuccessful aspirants to charismatic leadership; they were ideologists by nature, however uneducated they were. They were "natural Manichaeans".

Ill In the war years, I worked on German civilian and military morale. I had the good fortune for several years from early 1943 to be closely associated with Dr. Henry Dicks, who was at that time beginning to study the personality structure of the Nazi prisoners of war. Their attitudes as they emerged in the course of these investigations began to fall into a pattern which had been formed in my previous studies. The heavy stress on the value of comradeliness made me think back to Schmalenbach, and I began in a vague, fumbling way to see the German army as an elaborate administrative and logistic framework for a network of primary groups. This insight did not come to me as a result of any clearly perceived prior hypothesis; it was, in fact, forced on me by the German zeal in the use of the term Gemeinschaft in all sorts of connections: e.g., Frontgemeinschaft, Kampfgemeinschaft, etc. The integration of a large society through attachments which fell short of attachments to the central value system of the society now emerged in my mind as a possibility. It was the first time that the idea occurred to me. The ties which bound these primary groups to the larger structure remained obscure to me. I did not see that they were diverse and I did not see the pattern of their diversity. fc, There was a phenomenon which we called during the war the "hard core," that is, the convinced Nazisobdurate, steadfast, unyielding as soldiers, stiffening and strenthening influences among their fellow soldiers. There was also the sergeant and the junior officer, more often than not non-Nazi, devoted to his men as a father or older brother would be, concerned to keep them alive while doing his job. At this time, I did not make a clear distinction in my mind between the apolitical officers and sergeants and those with a strong ideological bent, between the paternal, protective person and the hard core. So I failed to perceive the distinction between the personal and the ideological, which later on seemed to me to be extremely significant I treated both of them as leaders of the small groups, whose spirit permeated followers and strengthened them, each one separately and each one becoming the center of influence upon his comrades. There were other features of the outlook and conduct of the German soldiers, the need to demonstrate

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Ii 1

dependence of corporate efficiency on primary group morale; (c) the role of the mediating or linking person in binding the primary group to the corporate body. {For this last point, I found support in Alexander Leighton's studies of the administration of the displaced Japanese camps.) Here were the elements from which I tried to develop my views on the role of primary groups in the reproduction and modification of the larger society.

IV In the autumn of 1947, I presented a course of lectures at the London School of Economics, entitled "The Primary Groups in the Social Structure," and repeated this course again in the autumn of 1948. In this course I dealt mainly with industrial and military primary groups, to some extent with religious primary groups, especially the store-front revivalist religious sects in the industrial centers in the United States, and the political primary groups such as conspiratorial and revolutionary cells. Although I dealt at some length with their internal structure, I did not attend particularly to the nature of the ties holding the members of the groups together. I devoted some time to the description of identification, in the usual psychoanalytic way, and, without entering into elaborate detail, attributed the formation of primary groups and their effectiveness in influencing the conduct of their members to the "need for love," which I left without further analysis. I simply accepted it as a datum and attributed all primary groups to thismilitary, industrial, and religious. I did not attempt to refute Cooky's statement about the transmission of the ethos of primary groups into the public sphere, but I was skeptical of it since I saw that things were really far more complicated than Cooley believed. I later concluded that the kind of primary group which endows a society with some of its values was one which Cooley had not really consideredthe ideological primary group and that its transmission could take place only if there were a real diminution of the intensity with which such values were experienced. At that time, however, I had not yet arrived at a clear distinction between ideological and personal primary groups. I knew they were different from each other and I felt a little uneasy about including religious and political sects as primary groups. They seemed to be different; yet they also seemed to belong to the category of groups with a very intense solidarity, which demanded far-reaching individual renunciation on behalf of the group. They were characterized by an extreme "we-consciousness." There was much emotion involved in the mutual attachment which made them up. The fact that Geman army primary groups contained both political and nonpolitical elements made me think that the difference, although real, was not significant enough to place them into a totally different category, but the difference continued to make me uneasy for some time. I should

Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties 119 add that I was also confused by Max Weber's usage of charisma, whereby he failed to differentiate between striking personal qualities and possession by the sacred. Attraction by the sacred quality of another individual and by his personality both appeared to be equally charismatic. It was difficult to break through the barrier created by Weber's own failure to distinguish these two possibilities. In 1949, on the invitation of Professors Lazarsfeld and Merton, I was given the opportunity to reanalyze the material presented in The American Soldier with respect to the role of primary group membership on fighting effectiveness. While I studied the primary group phenomenon in the American army, I also went back to Georges Sorel, to write an introduction to a new edition of Sorel's Reflection on Violence. I now saw what had escaped me in my studies of Sorel two decades before: Sorel, the theorist of the "heroic" orientation in politics, believed that the right setting for the heroic life was the small conventicle of morally integral individuals who were possessed by the superior revolutionary morality. The correlation between an intense relationship to ultimate values, to sacred objects and symbols on the one side, and a closed conventicular life on the other was brought to the fore by my study of Sorel. The similarity of Sorel's notions of revolutionary heroism and Ernst Junger's appreciation of soldierly comradeship in the Fronterlebnis, and the difference between their kind of primary group and that of the largely apolitical American soldier who fought out of a general sense of obligation, comradely solidarity, and the need to demonstrate manliness carried me beyond Schmalenbach into a greater awareness that within what he called the Bund there were at least two separate types.

In the autumn of 1949 and the winter and early spring of 1950, Professor Parsons and I wrote the "General Statement", and the "Values, Motives, and Systems of Action" in Towards a General Theory of Action. Only two parts of this will concern us here: the paradigm of interaction and the classification of the properties of objects. These highly abstract formulations are relevant here because, at the time when we made them, I thought they clarified certain features of the primary group, and because further work on the primary group has shown wherein they must be revised and reformulated. In the interaction paradigm, the two partners are treated as responding to each other's expectations and intentions, as perceived by the responding person. It is always, according to the paradigm, the prospective response, in attitude or action, of the other person which motivates our orientation toward him. No attention is paid in the paradigm to the qualitative properties of the individual apart from his approving or disapproving, loving or unloving response. The introduction of the normative element,

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Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties 121 were being taken into account in the actions of real, living human beings toward each other. After this came the distinction between "classificatory," e.g., sex, age, and physical properties, and "relational" properties, e.g., biological relatedness and territorial location, both of which, it will be remembered, are grouped under the qualities of the organism. So far so good. It may be noticed that we dealt in a very slipshod way with beliefs as properties of objects. They were omitted entirely from the paradigm of interaction, and in the object classification they are acknowledged to be the objects of orientations, but from our treatment of them in the text it is clear that we did not perceive their significance in interaction and in the formation of social structures. Beliefs we treated as objects of orientation, but not as objects which are qualities of acting human beings. Although elsewhere in our work we repeatedly argued for the incorporation of cultural symbols in action, we only recognized them insofar as they were the objects of individual cognitive, appreciative, or moral evaluation in themselves. The understanding of religious or ideological collectivities had been omitted from analysis. This was another gap in our theoretical scheme which empirical research has helped to close.

derived from the culture, does not alter the fact that there is a gap between the interaction paradigm, which, as formulated, takes into account only "personal" relations (dispositional states of mind or qualities) and "collaborative" relations (performances), and the classification of the properties of objects. The paradigm was not sufficiently differentiated. It did not take into account states of mind entailing beliefs; it did not take into account primordial qualities. Had we differentiated the paradigm a little more, while building on the base we had created, we could have closed the gap which existed between it and the classification of objects, at least with respect to primordial qualities. Had we done so, we would then have improved the classification of ofjects and made it more realistic. As it was, the classification has turned out to be largely correct, but that was due more to inner theoretical necessity and the need for logical coherence than to an appreciation, at the time, of its connection with reality. It was, indeed, because we did not try it out on reality at once but were satisfied with theoretical coherence that it was so cumbersome. Furthermore, although I was already troubled by the distinction between the person as an object and the belief-possessed person, i.e., the zealot or enthusiast, and had in my own field studies come directly into collision with the difference, it did not enter into the paradigm at all or into the classification in a realistic way. It was only when I read the work of the Swedish theologian Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, that I discovered the nature of my unclarity about religious and political revolutionary cells as primary groups. It was also in this connection that I saw what had to be done to repair our classification of objects. This classification of objects was begun with the awareness, not sufficiently incorporated into the paradigm of interaction, that it was not only the other person's responses to us, that is, his approval or disapproval, or his action in conformity with or in deviance from our expectations or desires that are significant, but also certain features or characteristics of the person which are not part of his action or of. his personal attitude toward us. It had its points of departure in three phenomena: (1) the recognition that in responding to another person, one of the major criteriaand this is taken account of in the interaction-paradigmis his personality, that is, his temperamental disposition generally and the relation of that disposition to oneself as a person; (2) the distinction between performance and quality; (3) the distinction between classificatory and relational properties of objects, which corresponds to the distinction between universalistic and particularistic orientationin the pattern-variable scheme. It is clear to us from our, common sense and general observation, as well as from the analysis of the conception of Gemeinschaft, that certain organic and physical properties, certain properties of the organism in relation to the environment and unconnected with the social structure, had to be taken into account by us, because they

VI In the late spring of 1950 I went to Germany with Dr. Henry Dicks, who was then Nuffield Professor of Psychiatry at Leeds, to organize an inquiry, which I had designed, into the social structure of the Soviet army in the Second World War. The investigation was conducted through detailed interviews with deserters from the Soviet army, or with Soviet prisoners of war who had been taken by the Germans and who had remained behind in Western Germany after the end of the war. The Soviet soldiers' motivation in combat we found drew relatively little sustenance from any attachment to the central political and ideological symbols of the society in which they lived. Motivation came from three other sources instead: one, the morale of the small unit, i.e., the mutual support given by members of the group to each other and particularly the benevolent relationship of the junior officer and the noncommissioned officer to the men; second, the cult of manliness; third, diffuse patriotism, often contradictorily to the ideological symbols of the ruling group; and fourth, fear and awe of authority. The resulting picture was very different from Gemeinschaft or Gesellschaft, and, insofar as the structure of the army was a network of Bund-like bodies, it was certainly not one of ideological Biinde. The Soviet army was a very powerful organization which had a great deal of coherence; yet very little of that coherence seemed to come from attachment to ideological or political symbols, or even intense patriotism. Here again, empirical analysis has forced a reformulation of theory. In

T 122 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties 123 families does not demonstrate that the two variables are one, but rather that two types of attachments each move in the same direction. The primordial or ecological basis of Gemeinschaft thus seemed to me to be not merely a precondition of the formation, of Gemeinschaft but a very crucial property of the members which greatly influenced their conduct toward each other. At about this time I was studying in connection with my work on primary groups A. D. Nock's Conversion and Martin P. Nilsson's various books on Greek religion, especially his Greek Popular Religion, In these books, the "coerciveness" of the primordial properties of objects, and of the ties of blood and common territory, was very strikingly portrayed. Nock's distinction between religions of belief and religions of primordial membershipthe terms are my ownhelped me much here. Nock, Nilsson, and Michael Young's material gave me a clearer idea of the truth of our classification of objects and of where we had been muddled. (I also saw, by contrasting the East End families with the religious communities of the last century of the Roman Republic and the first century of the Empire, that the primordial property too could have had sacredness attributed to it. It too could be the object of attachments of different degrees of intensity. But this would carry us too far afield for present purposes.)

our analysis of systems of value orientation, we had, although pointing out that they could never be completely integrated, assumed that all parts, however mutually contradictory, were equally objects of orientation of the adult members of the society. The military studies revealed that participation in the central value system was very unequal in intensity and continuity, and that a large social organization could maintain a high degree of effectivenessintegrationwith only a modicum of attachment to its value system. It was possible therefore to correct this assumption without discarding the notion of a central value system. The difference in the degrees of intensity of attachment to a central system of value orientation was already contained in Max Weber's hint that the charismatic sensitivity can slumber within the rational-legal and traditional legitimations of authority. This had been touched on by Professor Parsons as early as The Structure ofSocial Action, and I had made something of it in 1948 when I wrote on essay on Max Weber, but in our analysis of systems of value orientation we did not distinguish between intense and attenuated attachments to those symbols. I cite this instance only to show to what an extent one's thought is always full of loose ends, and in what way the theoretical loose ends get tied together through research, and often that aspect of the research which is peripheral.

VII From the end of 1952,1 had the good fortune to be drawn by Michael Young into a loose association with his research on family and kinship in the East End of London. The family had always been regarded as a primary group by Cooley, Park, Thomas, et al. The extended family had been treated as a prototype of the Gemeinschaft. Yet it was obviously different from the military, industrial, and religious primary groups which I and others had previously studied. In our discussions of .his early interviews, I observed what Schmalenbach had observed a long time before, namely, that the ecological or primordial base of the Gemeinschaft was different from the relationship itself. But there seemed to be something more important than this distinction. As one thought about the strengths and tensions in family attachments, it became apparent that the attachment was not to the other family member merely as a person but as a possessor of certain especially "significant relational" qualities which could only be described as primordial. The attachment to another member of one's kinship group is not just a function of interaction, as Professor Homans would have it. It is because a certain ineffable.significance is attributed to the tie of blood. Even where affection was not great, the tangibility of the attachment to the other person, by virtue of our perception of his membership in the kinship group, is clearly in evidence. The fact that both those factors operate in many of the more intensely knit

VIII Cooley's proposition asserted a substantial harmony between the orientations in the primary group and the orientations in the larger society. He asserted, indeed, that the values pursued and acknowledged in each of these spheres were identical. Mayo's research on small groups in industry and my own research on small groups in military organizations of diverse nationalities have cast considerable doubt on this. Indeed, my own examination of the extent to which the ordinary soldier understood and shared in the purposes of the war and in the symbols of the state on behalf of which the war was being fought, promulgated by the leaders who were directing the war, has shown that acceptance was usually vague, unintense, and, although positive, as close to neutrality in concrete situations as it could be without being entirely absent. I found that persons with an intense preoccupation, continuous and fervent, with the symbols associated with authority in the corporate organization, within which the primary groups were formed, seemed to be of a very different kind from those persons who had a looser, more intermittent, and less zealous attachment to the symbols. Conversely, those with strong personal attachments, that is, attachments to the personal dispositions of their associates, seemed relatively unresponsive to the symbols of the larger society which were incorporated in the authorities of the society and its major organization. The contemplation of "ideological primary groups" disclosed the

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Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties 125 prevailing conceptions of this collaboration are usually erroneous. The earlier view of a steady progress from particular facts to general theories has now been replaced by the more sophisticated image of a hypothesis, derived from a general theory, being tested by a systematic scrutiny of particular facts: then either the theory is disconfirmed by the facts and is replaced by one more adequate to them, or the hypothesis and corresponding theory are confirmed and the problem is settled. There are variations and complications of this latter schema, but in all essentials this account of it is correct It sees the relationship as an orderly process of truth. But in reality, nothing could be less truthful than this picture of scientific growth. The growth of knowledge is a disorderly movement. It is full of instances of things known and overlooked, unexpected emergencies, and rediscoveries of long-known facts and hypotheses which in the time of their original discovery had no fitting articulation and which found such articulation only after a considerable time. It was for the purpose of giving a relatively realistic picture of this disorderly process on a very narrow front that I have offered the record of my own experience. It is an interesting question why sociologists hold this incorrect view of the relations between theory and research. Part of the difficulty arises from an erroneous conception of the nature of the growth of truth in physics, chemistry, and the other well established and esteemed sciences. Part of the error arises, however, from the position of the sociologists in the scientific community. Sociologists are at present, despite their increased numbers and prosperity, a depressed class. They feel themselves outside the pale of the more reputable sciences, and they wish very much to be within it They look for their elevation to "a theory" which will compel their general recognition. At the same time the theories which command attention in sociology are very abstract, very difficult to understand, and even more difficult to use in the understanding of the world as we know it from our experience. They are especially difficult and probably impossible to use at present in the way in which sociologists think a scientific theory ought to be used. These impediments do not in my opinion make them valueless in advancing our understanding. Far from it. In order, however, for these theories to improve our understanding they must be deprived of their salvationary and even of their awe-inspiring character. Sociologists must cease to look upon them as finished products, waiting to be applied, in toto, in an orderly and systematic way. They must be taken as general guides and not as specific directives. They must be brought into operation only on the basis of a feeling of personal intimacy. They must be used only after an osmotic assimilation which involves discriminating acceptance and rejection, which rests on the sense of fitness and appropriateness rather than on any formal test. Although this counsel is full of pitfalls, I would say that sociologists will learn to use theory when they have also

phenomenon of "overparticipation" in the system of ultimate values. The alternatives of "underparticipation," moderate and attenuated participation, and "overparticipation" were crystallized in my mind by an effort which I made in 1953 to describe, according to the theory of action, the structure of an alienated revolutionary party on the basis of autobiographies and personal records of former members, in an attempt to understand the nature of the tie and the resulting structure of persons who regard others in the light of their symbolic rather than personal significance. The central figures in these groups were just the opposite of the "underparticipators." They were involved in the central value system with great intensity. Shortly thereafter, in 1954, Bernard Berelson asked me to read and criticize the manuscript of the book which he and Paul Lazarsfeld were writing on the presidential campaign of 1948 in Elmira, New York. The material gathered in this inquiry showed that the proportion of those with intense and continuous responses to symbols referring to the central value system were in a very small minority. The proportion of those with no response at all was likewise rather small, and, in between, the large majority of the population maintained a very moderate interest which increased with the campaign. There seemed to be normal distribution of attachment to the central symbols of the society. This distribution, which is now displayed by the authors of Voting in their last chapter, is the prototype of the relationships which are maintained toward all the elements of the system of values prevailing in any society. Some are very much concerned with them, positively or negatively, some are not at all concerned with themthese are the "idiots" of whom Aristotle spoke and most are, in varying degrees of attenuation and dilution, intermittently concerned with them, acting in many situations from a mixture of considerations of personal attachment and a vague sense of duty in a role, on the one hand, and, on the other, a generalized, vague, occasional, and sometimes only limited sense of concern for the whole. The civil attachment, the moderate pluralistic concern for the whole, among other things, is not the spirit of the primary group. 00016/5 great hypothesis seems to fall to the ground when the ethos and tone necessary for the maintenance of civil society is seen to be inimical to the fervor and passion of the primary group. The ways in which the three different types of primary groups do, nonetheless, contribute to the integration of society, must however continue to be one of the major subjects of sociological inquiry. IX I have dared to tell this rambling tale of my intellectual wanderings because I have thought that it might help sociologists to obtain a more just conception of the collaboration of research and theory. I think that the

|Pr 126 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus 7 Charisma

learned to trust their unconscious discriminatory powers. These might often be wrong, but without them there is little hope. Theory will bear fruit in sociology only when it has been assimilated into the perception of concrete and particular events, and not as long as it is thought to be something which comes before and emerges from research. Sociological theory must be the explicit articulation of our thought about concrete events, and the explication of the presuppositions and implications of the thought so articulated. To put it differently, it must be the comparison and not the court of judgment of our concrete observation. Only under those conditions will it enrich our research into particular situations, and only then will it be enriched by that research.

In all societies deference is accorded to authoritative roles, their incumbents, and the norms they promulgate in consideration of their capacity to create, maintain, and change the order of society. In all societies there is a propensity in most human beings, on occasion, to perceive, beyond immediate and particular events, the forces, principles, and powers which govern the immediate and the particular and which impose and necessitate an order which embraces them. Particularly serious attention and respect are given to what are thought to be those transcendent powers which are manifested in the orders of nature and society and in patterns of norms which intend the ordering of human action. Where institutions, roles, persons, norms, or symbols are perceived or believed to be connected or infused with these transcendent powers, we say that they are perceived as charismatic. Charisma, then, is the quality which is imputed to persons, actions, roles institutions, symbols, and material objects because of their presumed connection with "ultimate," "fundamental," "vital," order-determining powers. This presumed connection with the ultimately "serious" elements in the universe and in human life is seen as a quality or a state of being, manifested in the bearing or demeanor and in the actions of individual persons; it is also seen as inhering in certain roles and collectivities. It can be perceived as existing in intense and concentrated form in particular institutions, roles, and individualsor strata of individuals. It can also be perceived as existing in attenuated and dispersed form. The propensity to seek contact with transcendent powers and to impute charismatic qualities varies in any society; it is extremely strong in some persons, feeble in others. It also varies during the life span of individuals and in the history of particular societies. Some societies are characterized by a greater frequency of intense and concentrated charisma; others, by a greater frequency of attenuated and dispersed charisma. Both types exist in varying admixtures in all societies. Intense and Concentrated Charisma The propensity to impute charisma is a potentiality of the moral, cognitive, and expressive orientations of human beings. The propensity to seek contact with transcendent powers and to impute charisma is rooted in the Previously published in a slightly different form in The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by David L. Sills, vol. 2, pp. 386-90. 1968 by Crowell Collier and Macmillan, Inc. Used with permission of the publisher.

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Charisma 129 According to Weber's usage, charismatic quality may be attributed to religious prophets and reformers, to dominating political leaders, to daring military heroes, and to sages who by example and command indicate a way of life to their disciples. In such personalities, the charismatic quality is believed to be manifested in extremes of passionate and intense action or of willed passivity, in extremes of exultant or serene possession. Charismatic quality is attributed to expansive personalities who establish ascendancy over other human beings by their commanding forcefulness or by an exemplary inner state which is expressed in a bearing of serenity. The "extraordinariness" iAusserallt'dglichkeit) of these charismatic persons is not simply statistical infrequency; rather, it is the intense and concentrated form in which they possess or are thought to possess qualities which are only slightly present in routine actions. Routine actions are those which are governed mainly by motives of moderate, personal attachment, by considerations of convenience and advantage, and by anxiety to avoid failure in conforming to the immediate expectations and demands of peers and superiors. Routine actions are not simply repetitive actions; they are uninspired actions in which immediately prospective gratifications and the demands of immediate situations and of obligations to those who are close at hand play a greater part than does the link with transcendent things. If any charismatic attribution is present in the pattern of routine action, it is not dominant and certainly is not vividly perceived. Such uninspired actions maintain social structures, and they also change them through numerous minor adjustments. They do not impel drastic changes. Charismatic persons, and those who are responsive to charismatic persons, aspire to larger transformations. They seek to break the structures of routine actions and to replace them with structures of inspired actions which are "infused" with those qualities or states of mind generated by immediate and intensive contact with the "ultimate"with the powers which guide and determine human life. The charismatic person is a creator of a new order as well as the breaker of routine order. Since charisma is constituted by the belief that its bearer is effectively in contact with what is most vital, most powerful, and most authoritative in the universe or in society, those to whom charisma is attributed are, by virtue of that fact, authoritative. Charismatic authority is antipathetic to those forms of authority which; invoke recently and currently acknowledged criteria of legitimacy and which call forth the performance of the previously performed. Even where such authorities command or recommend new actions, they legitimate the commands or recommendations by subsuming them under existing norms recently and currently accepted as valid. The bearer and the adherents of charismatic authority, in contrast, tend to think of their norms as legitimated by a source remote in time or timeless, remote in space or spaceless. The legitimacy of the norms enunciated by charismatic authority lies outside

neural constitution of the human organism. The intensity with which it is experienced and the strength of its motivation are also influenced by situational exigencies and by the prevailing culture. It can be deliberately cultivated by isolation from the routine environment, by instruction and self-discipline. It can be so prized that individuals are encouraged to allow it to come forward in their sensitivity. A culture can foster the discernment of charismatic signs and properties by focusing attention, providing canons of interpretation, and recommending the appreciation of the possession of these signs and properties. Whatever the sources of the propensity to impute charismaneural, situational, cultural, or any combination of thesewhen this propensity is intense enough to seek to penetrate beyond the immediate present, beyond the particular and the concrete to the more general categories and patterns which underlie and generate the vicissitudes of human existence, it results in a subjective experience of possession of charismatic quality or in a sensitivity and responsiveness to the subjectively experienced charisma manifested in the bearing, words, and actions of other individuals and institutions. Those persons who possess an intense subjective feeling of their own charismatic quality, and who have it imputed to them by others, we will call charismatic persons. In the charismatic persons it is "directly" experienced; in the others it is experienced only in "mediated" form through intensely and concentratedly charismatic persons or institutions. The authority exercised by these individuals who "experience" charisma directly, over all others in the society who experience it only in mediated form, we will call charismatic authority. The concept of charisma derives from the reference in u Corinthians which describes the forms in which the gifts of divine grace appear. It was taken up by Rudolf Sohm in his analysis of the transformation of the primitive Christian community into the Roman Catholic church;1 the emphasis there was on a "charismatic institution." The conception of charisma underwent its most important extension and formulation in the writings of Max Weber.2 He treated charisma as a property attributed to great innovating personalities who disrupt traditionally and rationallegally legitimated systems of authority and who establish or aspire to establish a system of authority claiming to be legitimated by the direct experience of divine grace. Weber also applied the concept to creative, expansive, innovating personalities who are regarded as "extraordinary" even though they neither claim to possess divine grace nor have it imputed to them. 1. Rudolf Sohm, Kirchenrecht, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 18921923). v 2. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, 2 vols., 4th ed. (Tubingen: Mohr, 1956); see especially 2:832-73: "Die charismatische Herrschaft und ihre Umbildung." Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, ed. Talcott Parsons (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957); see especially pp. 358-63: "Charismatic Authority"; pp. 363-72: "The Routinization of Charisma"; and pp. 386-92: "The Transformation of Charisma in an Anti-authoritarian Direction."

w 130 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus Charisma 131 these charismatic propensities and to bring them to bear, at least at first, on the accepted problems and the accepted vision of the order of nature. The discovery of utterly new truths through intuition, unbridled by the accepted techniques of observation and interpretation, is rejected. Those who persist in practicing their intuition are either excluded or are constrained to submit to the prevailing discipline. This discipline involves learning and affirming what is already known and accepting the prevailing canons of assessment Once this process of discipline has been accomplished, the acolyte is then freed to discern and create a new order through research. In party politics, there is often apprehension among the party bosses about persons who are thought to be charismatic and who arouse the charismatic sensitivity of the mass of the party, because of the dangers which they represent to established interests within the party. But because of their wider appeal outside the party machine itself, which is concerned with routine practices, they will be tolerated and even sought in order to win the support of the charismaticaUy sensitive for the party. In armies, the charismaticaUy heroic officers find a tolerated place among shock troopers and special units using unconventional methods of warfare in situations in which the routine procedures of military organization are thought to be inadequate. The military bureaucracy at higher staff levels does not find it easy to accommodate within its own circles the charismaticaUy inclined soldier who tries to attain to new principles of warfare or who, as a hero, arouses the devotion of ordinary soldiers whose charismatic sensitivity is aroused by the danger of battle. In bohemias, and in the circles of artists and literary men, aesthetically charismatic persons find the segregated environment congenial to disregard for the rules of routine social life and the creative transcendence of the traditional modes of artistic and literary expression. The authorities of the routine sectors of society are more inclined to tolerate these manifestations of aesthetic charisma as long as they do not intrude into the routine sectors. Nonetheless, because of the vagueness of the boundaries, friction is frequent. By segregation, the custodians of the routine spheres of social life show both their apprehension of the disruptive nature of intense and concentrated charisma and their appreciation of a virtue requiring acknowledgment Nonetheless, despite these efforts to contain those with intense charismatic propensities within situations where they can operate charismaticaUy and to subject them to the discipline of institutionalization, the boundaries are sometimes infringed. A continuous reinforcement of the barriers against a free movement of charismatic persons is carried on by the custodians of routine order. They do not always succeed. Churches have been broken from within by charismatic prophets and have often suffered defeat, at least for a time, by a sectarian rival under charismatic leadership. States have been destroyed by charismatic revolutionaries, parties swept away from their traditional pattern by charismatic dema-

the norms practiced in the existing society. Although it is contained in the culture of the existing society, the source or the criterion of the legitimacy of charismatic authority occupies a position within that culture which, under the dominance of routine, is incompatible with the expansive aspirations of any charismaticaUy asserted authority. Since it asserts the value of action which derives its impetus immediately, intensively, and unalloyedly from direct contact with "ultimate" sources of legitimacy, charismatic authority is of necessity revolutionary. Charismatic authority denies the value of action which is motivated by the desire for proximate ends sufficient unto themselves, by the wish to gratify personal affections, or by the hope of pecuniary advantage. CharismaticaUy generated order is order which acknowledges and is generated by the creativity which seeks something new, by discovery which discerns something new, by inspiration from transcendent powers. The actions of men in all ongoing societies are impelled by a variety of considerations. Personal affections, primordial attachments, anticipations of advantage and fears of loss, destructiveness, responsiveness to obligations or expectations of role performance in corporate bodies, unimaginative acceptance of given norms where no alternative seems visible or practicable, respect for concrete already-functioning authority these, together with an intermittent flickering of charismatic responsiveness, form the complex of impulsions from which any society reproduces itself and moves onward. Such charismatic elements as ordinary societies contain exist either in a highly segregated form or in a diffuse half-life. Concentrated and intense charismatic authority transfigures the half-life into incandescence. It involves a tremendous heightening of charismatic sensitivity. That is why charismatic authority, really intensely imputed and experienced charisma, is disruptive of any routine social order.

Segregation and Discipline of Intense Charisma All societies seek to make some provision for those persons whose actions are impelled by the possession of charismatic legitimacy. Within religious systems, -the cenobitic or anchoritic monastic orders are institutional frameworks for the segregation and control of the charismaticaUy endowed, i.e., those who are prone to experience a sense of direct contact with transcendent powers, This removes them from the scene of the routine and at the same time preserves and disciplines their charismatic quality within the legitimate order of the religious collectivity, in which a certain measure of attenuation and dispersal of charisma has been stabilized. Universities, which must reproduce many established patterns of thought and evaluation and carry on traditions, face similar problems in dealing with young persons of highly charismatic intellectual and moral propensities. Through training and research, they attempt to discipline

w 132 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus Charisma 133 intervention of the charismatic inspirationroutine actions return to the forefront of social life. With the increased effectiveness and consequent stability of institutions, the need for protective charisma which puts their members into direct, or in any case less mediated, contact with the sources of inspiration and purification is reduced. The selection of prospective leaders is again institutionalized, reducing the likelihood that intensely charismatic persons will be chosen. Thus, the process of the imputation of charisma is restored to its normal state. Attenuated and Dispersed Charisma The intensely charismatic element of the new order never evaporates entirely. It can exist in a state of attenuation and dispersion. The very effort of a charismatic elite to stabilize its position and to impose a charismatic order on the society or institution it controls entails deliberate dispersion. It entails spreading the particular charismatic sensitivity to ^ ' persons who did not share it previously. This means a considerable extension of the circle of charisma: more persons have to become charismatic; existing institutions have to have charisma infused into them; new institutions have to be created. All this brings with it not only a deliberate dispersion from a smaller to a larger number of persons but also produces an attenuation which is less intentional but more unavoidable. The inevitability of death and the need to provide for succession call for dispersion of charisma from a few persons and institutions to institutional offices, lineages, governing bodies, electoral procedures, or specified groups. The last of these, although not absolutely or proportionately numerous in their societies, are considerably larger than the original bearers of the imputed charisma, and their charismatic sensibility is, of course, much less intense. Then there is the tenacity of routine to be considered. Life cannot go on without routine, which is constantly reasserting itself. Thus, the charismatic founders of a new society might have elevated a particular norm of conducte.g,, equality or saintlinessto a dominant position, to the practical exclusion of all others. As time passes, personal and primordial attachments, considerations of expediency, and loyalties within particularistic corporate bodies become more prominent again. The norms of equality or of saintliness might still be respected, but not exclusively respected. This is what is meant by attenuation. Not all dispersions are the result of the changes in the situation of a new elite in which charisma was both concentrated and intense. One of the greatest dispersions in history is that which has taken place in modern states, in which an attenuated charisma, more dispersed than in traditional aristocracieswhere it was already more dispersed than in

gogues, constitutional orders supplanted by charismatic statesmen. Sciences have been revolutionized by unsuppressible charismatic intelligences; artistic genres have been transformed, against the resistance of orthodoxy, by the bearers of an originalcharismaticsensitivity. Conditions of Intense and Concentrated Charisma Crises which discredit routine institutions and the authorities who govern them arouse in the more charismatically disposed persons a more acute awareness of the insufficiency of an organization of life in which contact with the ultimate powers and standards of right and wrong has become attenuated by mediation and segregation and by absorption into routine. Their demand for therightorder of things is intensified; their sensibility to the divergence between this right order and the actually existing state of affairs is heightened. These crises, which reveal to the afflicted members of the society in which they occur the inadequacy of the inherited and prevailing institutional systems and discredit the elites which have hitherto dominated them, operate on charismatic propensities in a twofold manner. Those in whom the charismatic propensity is strongestout of intelligence, moral sensibility, metaphysical inclination, etc.will be the promulgators of the new vision of a better order; those in whom the charismatic propensities, although not strong enough to permit charismatic originality, are strong enough to respond to such a vision when concretely embodiedand mediatedin a charismatic person, are the most likely followers. Crises which are failures of the inherited order enhance the need of the potential followers for protective contact with the ultimately right and powerful. The incapacity of the hitherto prevailing institutions to afford moral and metaphysical nurture and succor to those who feel the need for it, and to afford it under morally and cosmically right auspices, generates in these defenseless persons a state of mind which is fertile for the seed of the more intensely creative charismatic persons. The result is a collective effort to establish a charismatically legitimate societyor church, or party, etc.which will possess a greater authenticity. Often these efforts are unsuccessful. Most of the movements are broken, after a brief period of excitation, into dispirited fragments which sometimes survive in segregation. Less often, the movement is successful, and the result is a charismatic order or at least an order in which a charismatic overlay covers the more tenacious routines of the older institutional system. The routine relations between superiors and subordinates in families, armies, workshops, and farms tend to reassert themselves after an initial adaptation to the pressures of charismatic visions and convictions. Once the crisis which generated the more intense charismatic sensibility is somehow resolvedoften as a result of the

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Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus 8 T h e M e a n i n g of the Coronation By Edward Shils and Michael Young

primitive tribes or absolute monarchiesis shared by the total adult citizenry. The extraordinary charisma of which Max Weber spoke was the intense and concentrated form. Its normal form, howeverattenuated and dispersed charismaexists in all societies. In this form it is attributed in a context of routine actions to the rules, norms, offices, institutions, and strata of any society. Though normal charisma plays a reduced part in the ordinary life of society, it is nonetheless a real and effective force. Quite apart from its manifestations in the routines of life which.are loosely governed by religious attachments, it enters into obedience to law and respect for corporate authority. Furthermore, it provides the chief criterion for granting deference in the system of stratification and pervades the main themes of the cultural inheritance and practice of every society. Thus, normal charisma is an active and effective phenomenon, essential to the maintenance of the routine order of society.

I The heart has its reasons which the mind does not suspect In a survey of street parties in East London at the time of the coronation of Elizabeth II, nothing was more remarkable than the complete inability of people to say why they thought important the occasion they were honoring with such elaborate ritual, and the newspapers naturally took for granted the behavior on which this essay is a comment What is perhaps more strange is that on the monarchy, at a coronation or any other time, political science and philosophy too are silent. About this most august institution there is no serious discussion at all. Some political scientists, as if sure that the end of so many nineteenthcentury reformers has been achieved, tend to speak as if Britain is now an odd kind of republic,1 which happens to have as its chief functionary a queen instead of a president It seems that even the most eminent scholars lose their sureness of touch when they enter the presence of royalty. Sir Ivor Jennings had nothing to say in his volume on Parliament,1 and in his Cabinet Government,* pausing only to note that the sovereign still possesses considerable influence on legislation and that the king is also an important part of the "social structure,** he gave nearly all his space on this subject to a historical treatment of the Victorian period. The late Professor Harold Laski was more discerning, even though his preferences belong to the more rationalistic phase of recent intellectual history. "Eulogy of its habits," he says, speaking of the monarchy, "has reached a Previously published in a slightly different form in the Sociological Review, vol. 1. no. 2 (1956), pp. 63-82. 1. The virtual disappearance of republican sentiment is obvious. John Collan (Communist Review, June 1953) and Erarys Hughes, M. P., are indeed unorthodox. The current Labour attitude was expressed by Mr. Attlee in the House of Commons on 9 July 1952. Speaking against sweeping economies in royal expenditure, he said, "It is a great mistake to make goverment too dull. That, I think, was the fault of the German Republic after the First World War. They were very drab and dull; the trouble was that they let the devil get all the best tunes." See also Sir Stafford Cripps (Hansard, 17 December 1947). 2. "Of the King we need say nothing. His part in the process of legislation has become little more than formal." Parliament (Cambridge, 1939), p. 3. 3. Cambridge, 1947.

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The Meaning of the Coronation 137 produced an aversion toward all the sentiments and practices associated with religion. People do not acknowledge the somewhat alarming existence of these sentiments within themselves and refuse to admit that they are at work in others. They are acknowledged only when they are derogated as "irrational"*a charge which is both true and misleading, because it serves to dismiss them from further consideration. The frequency with which the coronation of Elizabeth II was spoken of by ordinary people as an "inspiration,"10 and as a "rededication" of the nation, only underscores the egregiousness of the omission. This essay, using the coronation as a point of departure, seeks to advance, in some slight measure, the analysis of a neglected subject II In all societies, most of the adult members possess some moral standards and beliefs about which there is agreement There is an ordering and assessment of actions and qualities according to a definite, though usually unspoken, conception of virtue. The general acceptance of this scale of values, even though vague and inarticulate, constitutes the general moral consensus of society. Only philosophical intellectuals and prophets demand that conduct be guided by explicit moral standards. In the normal way, the general moral standards are manifested only in concrete judgments, and are seldom abstractly formulated. Persons who conduct themselves in accordance with rigorous and abstract schemes of moral value, who derive and justify every action by referring it to a general principle, impress most others as intolerable doctrinaires. To the doctrinaires, of course, the ordinary man is even more shocking; they would shake the homme moyen sensuel from his spiritual slothfulness and elevate him to a higher plane on which he would act knowingly only in the service of the highest good. To the doctrinaire, to the ideological intellectual, the ordinary sociable man is a poor thingnarrow, unprincipled, unmoral. The ordinary man, is, of course, by no means as poor a thing as his educated detractors pretend. He too is a moral being, and even when he evades standards and dishonors obligations, he almost always concedes their validity. The revivalist reassertion of moral standards in highly individualistic frontier groups, or among detribalized primitive societies in the process of yielding before the pressure of a modern economy, are 9. See, for instance, Percy Black, The Mystique of Modern Monarchy (London: Watts, 1953). 10. Not only in Britain and the Commonwealth. Sebastian Haffher speaks of the way in which the coronation has "taken hold of the public consciousness of America, France and Germany.... There is, instead, an absorbed participation which almost, momentarily, removes the barriers of statehoodas if these foreign countries were celebrating, with mourning or rejoicing, great events in their own ruling Houses, or as if the British Monarchy had become a common possession of the Western world at large." The Twentieth Century, June 1953, p. 418.

level of intensity more comparable with the religious ecstasy of the seventeenth century, when men could still believe in the divine right of kings, than of the scientific temper of the twentieth, which has seen three great imperial houses broken, and the King of Spain transformed into a homeless wanderer."* For the rest, while lightly attributing this change in attitude to the imperial propaganda conducted since Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, he too devotes himself to constitutional history, with special reference to the tangled events of 1911 and 1931. British political philosophy of the 1950s was as applicable to a republic as it was to a monarchy, whose place in a modern society was a subject most studiously avoided.* Kingsley Martin was almost the only modern political writer to concern himself* with the theme to which Walter Bagehot gave such prominence when he set out in 1867 to trace "how the actions of a retired widow and an unemployed youth become of such importance."' Bagehot firmly recognized that the role of the Crown was not so much constitutional as "psychological." He supported the monarchy for the precise reason that republicans opposed it: because it enabled the educated ten thousand to go on governing as before. By commanding their unbounded loyalty, it tamed the uncouth "labourers of Somersetshire" who, in their simplicity, needed a person to symbolize the state. In this way "the English Monarchy strengthens our government with the strength of religion It gives now a vast strength to the entire constitution, by enlisting on its behalf the credulous obedience of enormous masses."8 Mr. Martin did not of course share Bagehot's outlook. But up to a point he put the same stress on the psychological functions which the sovereign performs so well because of the sacredness with which he is invested. Once this assertion was made, even he fell back, in the greater part of the book, on the amusing story of the relations of the sovereign with Lord Melbourne, Lord Beaconsfield, Mr. Gladstone, and the glittering host whose lives are the constitutional history of the realm. The careful avoidance of the monarchy's role in British life appears, to the authors of this essay, to have been the consequence of an "intellectualist" bias. It was avoided because the monarchy has its roots in man's beliefs and sentiments about what he regards as sacred. The decline in the intensity of religious belief, especially in the educated classes, has 4. Parliamentary Government in England (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938), p. 389. 5. Sir Ernest Barker scarcely refers to monarchy in his Reflections on Government (Oxford, 1942) and passes over it entirely in his brief "Reflections on English Political Theory" (Political Studies I, no. 1, [1953]: 6-12). 6. The Magic of Monarchy (London: Nelson, 1937). The article by J. G. Weightman, "Loyal Thoughts of an Ex-Republican," and other articles in the June 1953 issue of The Twentieth Century must also rank as shining exceptions. 7. The English Constitution (Oxford, 1936), p. 30. 8. Ibid., pp. 35, 39.

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The Meaning of the Coronation 139 the most serious manner, but also from the struggle against morality being continuously enacted in the human mind. Dr. Ernest Jones, in a perceptive essay,12 has pointed to the fundamental ambivalence in the attitude to authorityfirst toward the parents, then toward the wider authorities of state and church, and finally toward the rules which emanate from these authorities. This ambivalence can be overcome in a number of ways of which reaction-formation and displacement are the most prominent. In order to curb an impulse to contravene a moral law, men will sometimes put all their energy into the fulfillment of the contrary impulse. Connection with the symbols of morality or proximity to them helps in this exertion and reinforces the strength which the individual can muster from his own resources to keep the moral law uppermost It reestablishes the preponderance of positive devotion to the moral rules to enter into contact with them in their purest form. Contact with them in their most sacred formas principles, or when symbolized in ritual activities, or when preached in moving sermons or speechesrenews their potency and makes the individual feel that he is in "good relations" with the sacred, as well as safe from his own sacrilegious tendencies. If this argument be accepted, it is barely necessary to state the interpretation of the coronation which follows from it: that the coronation of Elizabeth II was the ceremonial occasion for the affirmation of the moral values by which the society lives. It was an act of national communion. In this we are merely restating the interpretation, in a particular context, of a more general viewwhich can apply to Christmas, Independence Day, Thanksgiving Day, May Day, or any other great communal ritualexpressed by a great sociologist. "There can be no society," said Durkheim, "which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective, ideas which make its unity and its personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments; hence come ceremonies which do not differ from regular religious ceremonies, either in their object, the results which they produce, or the processes employed to attain these results. What essential difference is there between an assembly of Christians celebrating the principal dates of the life of Christ, or of Jews remembering the exodus from Egypt or the promulgation of the decalogue, and a reunion of citizens commemorating the promulgation of a new moral or legal system or some great event in the national life?"13

instances of the respect vice pays to virtue. The recourse to the priestly confessor and the psychoanalyst testify to the power of moral standards even in situations where they are powerless to prevent actual wrongdoing. We do not claim that men always act in conformity with their sense of values, nor do we claim that the measure of agreement in any society, even $he most consensual, is anywhere near complete. Just as no society can exist without moral consensus, without fairly far-reaching agreement on fundamental standards and beliefs, so is every society bound to be the scene of conflict. Not only is there a clash of interests, but moral and intellectual beliefs too are in collision. Yet intertwined with all these J conflicts are agreements strong enough to keep society generally peaceful f and coherent. What are these moral values which restrain men's egotism and which enable society to hold itself together? A few can be listed illustratively: generosity, charity, loyalty, justice in the distribution of opportunities and rewards, reasonable respect for authority, the dignity of the individual and his right to freedom. Most people take these values so much for granted that argument about them seems neither necessary nor possible. Their very commonplaceness may seem to place them at the very opposite pole from the sacred. Yet these values are part of the substance of the sacred, and values like them have sacred attributes in every society. Life in a community is not only necessary to man for the genetic . development of his human qualities. Society is necessary to man as an A object of his higher evaluations and attachments, and without it man's / human qualities could notfindexpression.'' Thepolis or community is not just a group of concrete and particular persons; it is, more fundamentally, a group of persons acquiring their significance by their embodiment of values which transcend them and by their conformity with standards and rules from which they derive their dignity. The sacredness of society is at bottom the sacredness of its moral rules, which itself derives from the presumed relationship between these rules in their deepest significance and the forces and agents which men regard as having the power to influence their destiny for better or for worse. Man, as a moral creature with the capacity to discriminate among degrees of Tightness and wrongness, feels not only safe but also terribly unsafe in the presence of the abstract symbols of these moral rules. This is one reason why there is a recurrent need in men to reaffirm the Tightness of the moral rules by which they live or feel they ought to live. The reaffirmation of the moral rules of society serves to quell their own hostility toward these rules and also reinstates them in the appropriate relations with the greater values and powers behind the moral rules. The need to reaffirm the moral rules comes, then, not only from their sacred character, which require that they and their sources be respected in (ll.lThe Politics of Aristotle, Trans. Sir Ernest Barker (Oxford, 1946), p. 2.

12. "The Psychology of Constitutional Monarchy," in Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis, vol. I (London: Hogarth, 1951). 13.'Elementary Forms of ReligiousLif(-(London: Allen & Unwin, 1915), p. 427. Cf. also A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders (Cambridge: Cambridge | University Press, 1922), chap. 5. I

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The Meaning of the Coronation 141 Apart from the momentary appearance of the moderator of the general Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the Church of England administers the entire ceremony (though the Duke of Norfolka Roman Catholic organized the one in question), and yet there is no indication that in 1953 this was regarded as anomaly in a country where only a small proportion of the population actively adheres to that church. Britain is generally a Christian country, it is certainly a religious country, in the broad sense, and in the 1953 coronation service the Church of England served the vague religiosity of the mass of the British people without raising issues of ecclesiastical jurisdiction or formal representation. As with so much else in the coronation service, behind the archaic facade was a vital sense of permanent contemporaneity. Presenting the Holy Bible. When the moderator presents the Bible to the sovereign, the archbishop says that this act is performed in order to keep His Majesty "ever mindful of the Law." The Bible is a sacred object which contains in writing the fundamental moral teachings of the Christian society. Since this Bible is to go with the sovereign always, his moral consciousness is to be kept alive by means of continuous contact with the Book in which God's will is revealed. As the moderator says, "Here is Wisdom; This is the royal Law;14 These are the lively Oracles of God." The bible which is handed to the sovereign is not simply a closed andfinalpromulgation of moral doctrine. It is the "lively Oracles of God," in which moral inspiration and stimulus for the mastery of constantly emerging new events are to be found. The Bible is the vessel of God's intention, a source of continuous inspiration in the moral regulation of society. The anointing. When the sovereign is divested of his regalia, he is presented as a frail creature who has now to be brought into contact with the divine, and thus transformed into a king or queen, who will be something more and greater than the human being who has received the previous instruction. When the sovereign sits in the saintly King Edward's Chair, he is anointed by the archbishop with consecrated oil which sanctifies him in his regal office. When he makes the cross on the sovereign's hands, breast, and the crown of his head, he places him in the tradition of the kings of Israel and of all the rulers of England. He anoints / him saying "And as Solomon was anointed king by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, so be thou anointed, blessed, and consecrated King over the Peoples." It is not merely an analogy; it is a symbolization of reality, in conformity with sacred precedent. The sovereign shows his submission before the archbishop as God's agent, kneeling before him while he implores God to bless him.

The coronation was exactly this kind of ceremonial in which the society reaffirms the moral values which constitute it as a society and renews its devotion to those values by an act of communion. In the following pages, this interpretation of the coronation will be illustrated by a brief analysis of the service itself and of some aspects of public participation in it in The coronation service itself is a series of ritual affirmations of the moral values necessary to a well-governed and good society. The key to the coronation service is the sovereign's promise to abide by^thejrnoral standards of society. JJte^iolejemcejLterate^Jjie^ above the personality of the sovereign. In his assurance that he will observe the canons of mercy, charity, justice and protective affection, he acknowledges and submits to their power. When he does this, he symbolically proclaims his community with his subjects, whoin the ritual and in the wider audience outside the Abbeycommit themselves to obedience within the society constituted by the moral rules which he has agreed to uphold. This intricate series of affirmations is performed in the elaborate pattern which makes~up the coronation ceremony. The recognition. When the archbishop presents the sovereign to the four sides of the "theatre," he is asking the assembly to reaffirm their allegiance to the sovereign not so much as an individual as the incumbent of an office of authority charged with moral responsibility and for which he has the preliminary qualifications of a blood tie. The "People" who signify their willingness to "do homage and service" were once the actual members and representatives of the estates whose participation was necessary for the security of the realm. Now, those within the Abbey, although many of great power stand among them, are no longer its exclusive possessors. The "homage and service" of the entire society is far more important than it was in earlier coronations, and their offering is no more than a dramatic concentration of the devotion which millions now feel. The oath. The sovereign is asked whether he will solemnly promise and swear to govern the people of the United Kingdom and the Dominions and other possessions and territories in accordance with their respective laws and customs. When he does so, he clearly acknowledges that the moral standards embodied in the laws and customs are superior to his own personal will. The sovereign agrees to respect justice and mercy in his judgments, and to do his utmost to maintain the laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel. In doing this, he acknowledges once more the superiority of the transcendent moral standards and their divine source, and therewith the sacred character of the moral standards of British society.

14. It is the law which is to govern royalty, and only in this way does it refer to the law made by royalty for the government of society.

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The Meaning of the Coronation 143 There are those who claimed (with rather more justice) that the involvement in the coronation was no more than an expression of an ever present British love of processions, uniforms, parades, and pageants. Still others saw the whole affair as a national "binge," or an opportunity for millions of people to seize the occasion for a good time. The youth and charm of the queen and the attractiveness of her husband and children were also cited to explain the absorption of the populace. Which of these explanations is correct? All of them, it seems to us, are at best partial answers. They all overlook the element of communion with the sacred, in which the commitment to values is reaffirmed and fortified. As we said earlier, the rationalistic bias of educated persons in the present century, particularly those of radical or liberal political disposition, is liable to produce abhorrence toward manifestations of popular devotion to any institution which cannot recommend itself to secular utilitarianism. The collision between the latter viewpoint and the devoted gravity of the popular attitude was revealed most strikingly in the uproar which followed the publication of David Low's cartoon in the Manchester Guardian on 3 June. This cartoon showed a Blimp-like figure, "the morning after," a paper crown awry on his head, the remains of the tinsel and crepe paper of a gay party littered about him, a television receiver in the corner and over it all a grim reminder that a very vast sum had been spent on the spree. It was in the radical "debunking" tradition. It called forth a storm of denunciation. Moral sentiments had been affronted by Low's frivolity at a time when they were at a high pitch of seriousness.1s The first flood of letters expressed indignation that a cynical reference to monetary costs should intrude upon a state of exhilaration, of "inspiration," of "uplift," upon "a unique and inspiring experience" of "heartfelt national rejoicing," upon a "spirit of service and dedication and the inspiring unity of all the people who rejoiced together (and who rededicated themselves) on this wonderful occasion." The second stage of the correspondence was no less significant. Although the anti-Low letters continued, the outburst of sentiment affirming the sacred character of the national participation in the coronation made the more skeptical uncomfortable. Some of those who sprang to Low's defense found the expression of such intensely serious moral indignation "frightening." 15. Durkheim, to whose understanding of the function of great communal rituals we have already referred, designated the side of life which includes action on behalf of or in accordance with the sacred moral values as "la vie serieuse." Durkheim might have been referring to the "Low crisis" when he wrote: "What social danger is there in touching a tabooed object, an impure animal or man, in letting the sacred fire die down, in eating certain meats, in failure to make the traditional sacrifice over the graves of parents, in not exactly pronouncing the ritual formula, in not celebrating certain holidays, etc.? We know, however, what a large place in the repressive law of many peoples ritual regimentation, etiquette, ceremonial, and religious practices play An act is criminal when it offends strong and defined states of the collective conscience." The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Macmillan, 1933), pp. 72, 80.

Presenting the sword and the orb. The sovereign is then told that he will be given power to enforce the moral law of justice and to protect and encourage those whose lives are in accordance with the law. He is commanded to confirm what is in good order, and to restore to order what has fallen away from it The sword is an instrument of destruction. It is as dangerous as the sacred foundations of the moral rules themselves and its terrible power, for evil as well as good, must never be forgotten by the sovereign. To stress this dual potentiality of authority, it is, throughout the rest of the ceremony, carried naked before him by the peer who redeemed it. In this way, the terrible responsibilities and powers of royal authority are communicated to the sovereign and the people. The people are thus made aware of the protection which a good authority can offer them when they themselves adhere to the moral law, and of the wrathful punishment which will follow their deviation. He is next invested with the bracelets of sincerity and wisdom and is dressed in the Robe Royal, which enfolds him in righteousness. With these dramatic actions, he is transformed from a mere person into a vessel of the virtues which mustflowthrough him into his society. Thus transformed, he is reminded of the wide sphere of his power, and of the responsibilities for its moral and pious use, by the orb, which he takes in his hand and places on the altarthe repository of the most sacred objects. In doing this, he resanctifies his own authority. He is told to execute justice but never to forget mercy. The benediction. The communal kernel of the coronation becomes visible again in the benediction, when the duties of the subjects are given special prominence by the archbishop. In his blessing, he says: "The Lord give you faithful Parliaments and quiet Realms; sure defence against all enemies; fruitful lands and a prosperous industry; wise counsellors and upright magistrates; leaders of integrity in learning and labour; a devout, learned, and useful clergy; honest, peaceable, and dutiful citizens." The circle of obligation is completed: the sovereign to God's rule, and to his subjects in the light of God's rule, and then his subjects to him by the same standard.

IV The 1953 coronation service and the procession which followed were shared and celebrated by nearly all the people of Britain. In these events of 2 June the queen and her people were, through radio, television, and press and in festivities throughout the land, brought into a great nationwide communion. Not only the principals and the spectators inside the Abbey but the people outside also participated in the sacred rite. There was no doubt about the depth of the popular enthusiasm. Only about its causes was there disagreement. Some claimed that it was the product of commercially interested publicity, others that it was the child of the popular press, others simply dismissed it as hysteria or "irrationality."

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The Meaning of the Coronation 145 mother nor father were far away when their children sat down for cakes and ice cream at one of the thousands of street and village parties held that week. Prominent in the crowds were parents holding small children on their shoulders and carrying even smaller ones in cradles. In all towns over the country, prams were pushed great distances to bring into contact with the symbols of the great event infants who could see or appreciate little. It was as if people recognized that the most elementary unit for entry into communion with the sacred was the family, not the individual. The solidarity of the family is often heightened at the cost of solidarity in the wider community. Not so at the coronation. On this occasion one family was knit together with another in one great national family through identification with the monarchy. A general warmth and congeniality permeated relations even with strangers. It was the same type of atmosphere, except that it was more pronounced, that one notices at Christmas time when, in busy streets and crowded trains, people are much more warm-hearted, sympathetic, and kindly than they are on more ordinary occasions. Affection generated by the great event overflowed from the family to outsiders, and back again into the family. One correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, reporting the coronation procession, observed: "The Colonial contingents sweep by. The crowd loves them. The crowd now loves everybody." Antagonism emerged only against people who did not seem to be joining in the great event or treating with proper respect the important social valuesby failing, for example, to decorate their buildings with proper splendor. A minor example of the increase in communal unity was the police report that, contrary to their expectations, the pickpockets, usually an inevitable concomitant of any large crowd, were entirely inactive during Coronation Day. An occurrence in a new housing estate on the outskirts of London provides another instance. There the organizer of a street party had for many months been engaged in a feud with a neighbor so violent that they had at one time summoned each other to the local court. The origin of the feuda minor quarrel about trespassing by childrenwas forgotten, and there were continuous outbursts of aggression which reached a climax in May, when the neighbor poured hot water over the fence onto some flowers which had just been planted. The neighbor's children were not enrolled for the coronation party until near the day itself. Then the neighbor came to the organizer and asked in a very humble way whether her own children might be included. They were accepted, and the two who had not exchanged friendly words for so long began to greet each other in the streets as they passed. On the day itself, the organizer, out of her generosity for everyone, went so far as to ask the neighbor to come in and watch her television set. When the neighbor had been in the house for half an hour she asked whether her husband, who was waiting alone next door, could join them. He came in, and when the service was over.the long-standing feud was Finally ended over a cup of tea.

The solemn sense that something touching the roots of British society was involved found expression in many other ways as well. An experienced observer of the London crowd said that the atmosphere on l"June was like that of Armistice Day 1918 and ofVE and VJ Days 1945: there was an air of gravity accompanied by a profound release from anxiety. The extraordinary stillness and tranquillity of the people on the route all through the early morning of 2 June was noted by many who moved among them. Churches received many persons who came to pray or to meditate in quiet, and in at least one famous London churchAll Hallows, Barking communion services were held every hour. Just as the coronation service in the Abbey was a religious ceremony in the conventional sense, so then the popular participation in the service throughout the country had many of the properties of the enactment of a religious ritual. For one thing, it was not just an extraordinary spectacle, which people were interested in as individuals in search of enjoyment. The coronation was throughout a collective, not an individual, experience. W. Robertson Smith, in his great work Lectures on the Religion of the Semites,'6 points out that acts of communion (of which the coronation can be regarded as an example) are never experienced by individuals alone: they are always communal occasions. They are acts of communion between the deity or other symbols of the highest values of the community, and persons who come together to be in communion with one another through their common contact with the sacred. The fact that the experience is communal means that one of the values, the virtue of social unity or solidarity, is acknowledged and strengthened in the very act of communion. The greatly increased sensitivity of individuals to their social ties, the greater absorption of the individual into his group and therewith into the larger community through his group, found expression not only on the procession route but in the absent people as well, notably through their families. The family, despite the ravages of urban life and despite those who allege that it is in dissolution, remains one of the most sinewy of institutions. The family tie is regarded as sacred, even by those who would, or do, shirk the diffuse obligations it imposes. The coronation of Elizabeth II, like any other great occasion which in some manner touches the sense of the sacred, brought vitality into family relationships. The coronation, much like Christmas, was a time for drawing closer the bonds of the family, for reasserting its solidarity, and for reemphasizing the values of the familygenerosity, loyalty, lovewhich are at the same time the fundamental values necessary for the well-being of the larger society. When listening to the radio, looking at the television, walking the streets to look at the decorations, the unit was the family, and neither

16. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (London: Black, 1927).

T^F 146 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus The Meaning of the Coronation 147 these days. Something a bit lavish for a change is good for the soul."" But he did not go far enough. The British love of processions, uniforms, and ceremonial is not just simple-minded gullibilityit is the love of proximity to greatness and power, to the charismatic person or institution which partakes of the sacred. The crowds who turned out to see the queen, who waited in the rain in quiet happiness to see the queen and her soldiers, were waiting to enter into contact with the mighty powers who were symbolically and, to some extent, really responsible for the care and protection of their basic values and who on this day had been confirmed in these responsibilities. The crowds who clamored for the queen outside Buckingham Palace or who lined the streets on the days following Coronation Day when she made her tours of London were not just idle curiosity-seekers. They were, it is probably true, looking for a thrill, but it was the thrill of contact with something great, with something which is connected with the sacred, in the way that authority which is charged with obligations to provide for and to protect the community in its fundamental constitution is always rooted in the sacred.

Something like this kind of spirit had been manifested beforeduring the blitz, the fuel crisis of 1947, the London smog of 1952, even during the Watson-Bailey stand in the Lord's Test or Lock's final overs at the Ovaland the broad reasons were probably the same. There was a vital common subject for people to talk about; whatever the individual's speciality, the same thought was uppermost in his mind as in everyone else's, and that made it easier to overcome the customary barriers. But not less important than the common subject is the common sentiment of the sacredness of communal life and institutions. In a great national communion like the coronation, people became more aware of their dependence upon each other, and they sensed some connection between this and their relationship to the queen. Thereby they became more sensitive to the values which bound them all together. Once there is a common vital object of attention, and a common sentiment about it, the feelings apt for the occasion spread by a kind of contagion. Kindness, met with on every side, reinforces itself, and a feeling of diffuse benevolence and sympathy spreads; under these circumstances the individual loses his egoistic boundaries and feels himself fused with his community. The need to render gifts and sacrifices, so central in religious ceremonies, was also apparent in various forms. Many persons sent gifts directly to the queen, and the vast scale of individual and collective gifts to persons known and unknown has been the occasion of much comment. Very many municipalities arranged "treats for old folks," local authorities gave gifts to school children, and gift giving within and between families was very widespread. The joint viewing of the coronation service and procession on the television called forth many presentations. The universal decorations attest not merely to the sense of festivity but also to the disposition to offer valuable objects on such an occasion of entry into contact with the sacred values of society. Low's cartoon in the Manchester Guardian certainly portrayed one aspect of the truth when he saw the whole thing as "one gigantic binge." But it was not just a "good time" or an "opportunity for a good time," as some persons grudgingly said in justification for giving themselves up to the coronation. There was an orgy, in a certain sense, but it was not just one of self-indulgence. Students of comparative religion have shown that an orgy following an act of communion with the sacred is far from uncommon. It aids the release of tension and reduces the anxiety which intense and immediate contact with the sacred engenders. Moreover, what appears to be simply an orgy of self-indulgence is often one of indulgence with goods which have been consecrated or which have some sacred, communallyv significant properties. Surcease from drabness and routine, from the commonplaces and triviality of daily preoccupation, is certainly one reason for the exaltation. There is surely wisdom in the remark of a philosophical Northern villager: "What people like is the sheer excess of it. We lead niggling enough lives

Let us now assume that this interpretation of the coronation is at least plausible and perhaps correct. Why, then, should it have taken place in this way in Great Britain in 1953? Not all coronations, British or foreign, have drawn such deep sentiments of devoted participation. Whereas a century ago republicanism had numerous proponents in England, it is now a narrow and eccentric sect. Although the stability of the British monarchy became well established in the course of the nineteenth century, persons who have lived through or studied the four coronations of the present century seem to agree that the coronation of Elizabeth II stirred greater depths in the people than any of its predecessors. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, British society, despite distinctions of nationality and social status, achieved a degree of moral unity equaled by no other large national state. The assimilation of the working class into the moral consensus of British society, though certainly far from complete, had gone further in Great Britain than anywhere else, and its transformation from one of the most unruly and violent into one of the most orderly and law-abiding is one of the great collective achievements of modern times. For whatever reasons, the twentieth century has certainly witnessed a decline in the hostility of the British working and middle classes toward the symbols of the society as a whole and toward the authorities vested with those symbols and the rules they promulgate and administer.

17. Manchester Guardian, 3 June 1953.

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The Meaning of the Coronation 149 monarchy is supported by one of the mechanisms by which the mind defends itself from conflict, namely, by the segregation of mutually antagonistic sentiments, previously directed toward a single object, onto discrete and separate objects." It might therefore be said that the vigor of British political life is actually rendered possible by the existence of the constitutional monarchy. But the aggressiveness which is channeled into the political arena is in its turn ameliorated and checked by the sentiments of moral unity which the Crown helps to create. Here it is not only the symbolism of the Crown but also the painstaking probity of Kings George V and VI in dealing with the Labour Party, both when it was in opposition and when it formed the government, which have helped to weld the Labour Party and its following firmly into the moral framework of the national life. An effective segregation of love and hatred, when the love is directed toward a genuinely love-worthy object, reduces the intensity of the hatred as well. Just as the existence of a constitutional monarchy softens the acerbity in the relations between political parties, so it also lessens the antagonism of the governed toward the reigning government. Governments are well known to benefit whenever the virtues of royalty are displayed.30 It appears that the popularity of the Conservative administration was at least temporarily increased by the coronation, and at the time much newspaper speculation centered on the question whether Mr. Churchill would use the advantage to win a large majority for his party at a general election. Thus we can see that the image of the monarch as the symbolic custodian of the awful powers and beneficent moral standards is one weighty element in moral consenses. But the monarch is not only a symbol. Personal qualities are also significant. Hence it is appropriate at this point to refer to the role of the royal family in attaching the population to the monarchy. Walter Bagehot said: "A family on the throne is an interesting idea also. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life."21 More and more has this become true since then. Where once to mention the family of the kingthat of Charles II or George IV, for examplewould have provoked laughter, it is now common form to talk about the royal family. The monarchy is idealized not so much for the virtue of the individual sovereign as for the virtue which he expresses in his family life. Devotion to the royal family thus does mean in a very direct way 19. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (London: Hogarth, 1937). 20. The Secretary of the Labour Party once told one of the authors of this essay that he had always been confident that Labour would win the hotly contested Gravesend by-election in 1947 because the then Princess Elizabeth had been married a short time before. 21. The English Constitution, p. 34.

It is true that the discredit into which the British "ruling class" fell as a result of the First World War, the General Strike, and the Great Depression diminished this moral unity. But consensus on fundamental values remained. The Second World War greatly contributed to the strengthening of attachment to society. The care which officers, junior and senior, took to avoid the waste of life on the battlefield, the government's provision for families at home, the steadiness of the emergence of victory, made for widespread solidarity and for absence of rancor even across gaps in that solidarity. The subsequent general election was soberly fought Following that, the Labour government, by its concern for the underprivileged, by its success in avoiding the alienation of the middle and upper classes, and by the embodiment of certain prized British virtues in its leaders, brought this moral unity of British society to a remarkably high level. Moreover, many British intellectuals who in the 1920s and 1930s had been as alienated and cantankerous as any, returned to the national fold during the war.18 Full employment and government patronage on a large scale, as well as a growing repugnance for the Soviet Union and a now exacerbated but hitherto dormant national pride or conceit also played their part in this development The central fact is that Britain came into the coronation period with a degree of moral consensus such as few large societies have ever manifested.

VI The combination of constitutional monarchy and political democracy has itself played a part in the creation and maintenance of moral consensus, and it is this part which we shall now briefly consider. The late John Rickman and Ernest Jones have argued that the deep ambivalence toward authority and toward moral rules has promoted the widespread acceptance of the monarchy in Britain and in other countries where constitutional monarchy has becomefirmlyestablished. Whereas the lands where personal or absolute monarchy prevailed were beset by revolution, countries of constitutional monarchy became politically stable and orderly, with a vigorously democratic political life. Hostility against authority was, it is said, displaced from royalty onto the leaders of the opposition party and even onto the leaders of the government party. Constitutional monarchies and their societies were fortified by drawing to themselves the loyalties and devotion of their members while avoiding the hostility which is always, in varying measure, engendered by submission to morality. When protected from the full blast of destructiveness by its very powerlessness, royalty is able to bask in the sunshine of an affection unadulterated by its opposite. The institution of the constitutional 18. Cf. Arthur Koestler's penetrating article on Richard Hillary in The Yogi and the Commissar (London: Cape, 1945), pp. 46-67.

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The Meaning of the Coronation 151 system of the society as a whole through its relationship with royalty. Quite apart from the armed forces, with their multiplicity of royal connection, by fleet, regiment and squadron, a thousand institutions of all kinds are also recognized by the presence of a member of the royal family as patron, president, or visitor. Royalty presides over such diverse organizations as the Royal Society and the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Royal Academy and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, the British Medical Association and the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Marylebone Cricket Club and the Lawn Tennis Association, the Red Cross and the National Playing Fields Association, St Mary's Hospital and the Royal Yacht Squadron, the Royal Forestry Society and the University of London. There are the royal charters, the patronage of charities, the inaugural ceremonies of hospitals and ships, gardens, and factories. The monarchy is the one pervasive institution, standing above all others, which has played a part in a vital way comparable to the function of the medieval church as seen by R. H. Tawneythe function of integrating diverse elements into a whole by protecting and defining their autonomy.24 Even where the monarchy does not assume ceremonial offices of the type just referred to, the function of holding together the plurality of institutions is performed in some measure by the peerage and the system of honors. In all institutions and professions, all forms of individual achievement and merit are recognized and blessed by this system. The outstanding actors and poets, doctors and scientists, leaders of trade unions and trade associations, scholars and sportsmen, musicians and managers, the brave, the brilliant, and the industrious, all receive confirmation of their conformity with the highest standards of society by an honor awarded by the sovereign. The sovereign acts as agent of the value system, and the moral values of the society are reinforced in the individuals honored. To sum up: a society is held together by its internal agreement about the sacredness of certain fundamental moral standards. In an inchoate, dimly perceived, and seldom explicit manner, the central authority of an orderly society, whether it be secular or ecclesiastical, is acknowledged to be the avenue of communication with the realm of the sacred values. Within its society, popular constitutional monarchy has enjoyed almost universal recognition in this capacity, and it has therefore been enabled to heighten the moral and civic sensibility of the society and to permeate it with symbols of those values to which the sensitivity responds. Intermittent rituals bring the society or varying sectors of it repeatedly into contact with this vessel of the sacred values. The coronation of

devotion to one's own family, because the values embodied in each are the same. When allowance is also made for the force of displacement, if it is accepted that a person venerates the sovereign partly because he is associated, in the seat of the emotions, with the wondrous parents of fantasy, and if it is accepted that there is also a sort of redisplacement at work, whereby the real parents and wives and children are thought of more highly because they receive some of the backwash of emotion from their royal counterparts,12 it is easy to see that the emotional change is a reciprocal one, and all the more powerful for that. Some aspects of this relationship become clear in the Christmas broadcast in which the sovereign year after year talks about the royal family, the millions of British families, and the nation as a whole, as though they are one." On sacred occasions, the whole society is felt to be one large family, and even the nations of the Commonwealth, represented at the coronation by their prime ministers, monarchs, and ambassadors, are conceived of as a "family of nations." * * " In other ways the monarchy has played in the past century on more ordinary occasions the same kind of role as it does at a coronationonly in a far less spectacular way. Thus British society has combined free institutional pluralism with an underlying moral consensus. The universities, the municipalities, the professional bodies, the trade unions, the business corporationsall have sought to enforce and protect their internal standards and to fend off external encroachment. Yet they have coexisted and cooperated in a remarkable atmosphere of mutual respect and relative freedom from acrimony. There are many reasons for this. In the present context we wish only to stress the unifying function of the monarchy and the orders of society which derive their legitimacy from connection with it. Every corporate body which has some connection with the sacred properties, the charisma, of the Crown thereby has infused into it a reminder of the moral obligations which extend beyond its own corporate boundaries. It is tied, so to speak, to the central value 22. One of the authors, during an interview in a London slum district, asked a mother the age of her small son. "Just the same age as Prince Charles," she replied, looking at him with a smile of pride and love. 23. We have mentioned above the significance of the reconciliation between the intellectuals and the monarchy in the 1950s, as part of the general reacceptance of society by the intellectuals. With respect to the family, the change is equally impressive. Who among the figures of the high intelligentsia would now accept the critical views on the family of Shaw, Wells, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, D. H. Lawrence, or the Bertrand Russell of the 1920s? Who among well-known British intellectuals today would be sympathetic with H. G. Wells's pronouncement: "The family can remain only as a biological fact. Its economic and educational autonomy are inevitably doomed. The modern state is bound to be the ultimate guardian of all children, and it must assist, replace or subordinate the parents as supporter, guardian and educator; it must release all human beings from the obligation of mutual proprietorship and it must refuse absolutely to recognize or enforce any kind of sexual ownership." Experiment in Auto-Biography, vol. 2 (London: Gollancz and Cresset Press, 1934), p. 481.

24. "Religion.. .the keystone which holds together the social edifice..." Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: John Murray, 1926), p. 279.

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Elizabeth II provided at one time and for practically the entire society such an intensive contact with the sacred that we believe we are justified in interpreting it as we have done in this essay, as a great act of national communion.

The vicissitudes of human life are embedded in our very conception of its nature. Life is a perpetual struggle of the organism both to maintain its integrity, which requires safety, against the menacing intrusion of one part of the environment into the flow of sustenance of another part, and to maintain itself against the dangers of decay and wrongdoing within itself. Even if the environment were beneficent, the human being could not maintain a stable equilibrium; his growth brings with it difficulties for which he is unprepared. The human being is not a passive recipient of sustenance and a passive object of deprivations. He is active; he has cognitive powers and curiosity which reach outward into the universe and which seek an order as coherent and as comprehensive as possible. He is expansive in his desires. He seeks to acquire possession and control over his environment and he does so in a condition of ignorance and uncertainty as to whether he will be successful. Every new enterprise therefore courts the danger of defeat and destruction. What is true of the individual organism is true of collectivities, of families and kinship groups, of armies and cities, of universities and sects, of states and whole societies. Every collectivity lives in a changing environment; the changes in the environment sometimes bring advantages and sometimes deprivations. The avoidance of the deprivations brought by changes in the environment is a major task of every collectivity and above all of those who make themselves responsible for its maintenance. Complete success in avoidance of these exogenous deprivations for any extended period is practically impossible. Every collectivity is in danger not only from changes outside itself but from changes within as well. The wants of its constituent members do not grow in harmonious articulation; relationships which were at one time mutually gratifying and thereby sustaining to the collectivity cease to develop in ways which permit reciprocity and consensus. In addition, external dangers generate internal dangers. Leaders who are effective at one stage in dealing with the external environment lose their legitimacy when the environment becomes unencompassable and their followers, subordinates, or dependents cease to be willing to accept them. The frustration and defeat of new undertakings and the failure of old, once successful ones, the loss of honor and eminence, neglect, the defeat Previously published in a slightly different form in The Religious Situation, edited by Donald R. Cutler (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 733-48.

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Ritual and Crisis 155 It is said by some students of the subject that ritual is part of a system of beliefs and expressive actions which are espoused and performed in response to danger. Ritual is part of a complex act of self-protection from destructive, unintelligible, and immoral forces. By reenacting contact with sacred things and reaffirming the Tightness, ritual reinforces the beliefs which enable the actor to confront and deal with crises with some anticipation of effectiveness. Effectiveness might be thought of as a reduction in the probability of occurrence of deprivation, but it is more likely to be a fortification of a person's capacity to bear deprivations about to occur. Ritual sanctifies the participant by infusing into his self-consciousness, through contact with its symbolic manifestation, a tincture of sacredness. By renewing contact with the symbols or emblems of the norms and forces which are believed to be constitutive of the well-being of the collectivity and by reestablishing contact with essential principles and vital powers in the universe, those who practice the rituals feel themselves entitled to believe that they will walk along the right path and that danger will be avoided, but that if danger is realized, they will be able to interpret it correctly and behave appropriately. Ritual and belief are intertwined with each other; yet they are separable. Beliefs and systems of beliefs could conceivably be accepted without adopting the practice of the rituals associated with them. When we speak of rituals in the sense we are discussing them here, we think of their cognitive or beliefful content. Logically, beliefs could exist without rituals; rituals, however, could not exist without beliefs. Rituals stand on a continuum of kinds of stereotyped behavior running from ceremonial etiquette and usage on to habit and conditioned reflexes. An elaborate etiquette has much in common with ritual in its rigid stereotypical structure, in its specification of actions, and in its symbolization of differing appreciation of the charismatic qualities embodied in great authority, power, and eminence. But etiquette is at the periphery of the relation to sacred things while ritual is at the center. "Ceremonial" belongs to the same family of rigidly stereotyped actions but is closer to ritual than to etiquette because it has more cognitive content; it is more likely to have some elements of belief associated with it and it is more likely to refer to vital features of collective life. Its occurrence is more concentrated than that of etiquette. It is performed in certain places and on certain occasions which are called"ceremonial occasions"just as ritual is performed on specified occasions, in contrast with etiquette, which is performed continuously in interaction between persons of certain status positions. Ritual and Prevailing Opinion Ritualand much of what is said here applies to ceremonial toohas had a bad name for the past century among intellectuals raised, as so

and decay of collectivities and the disappearance of particular relationships and persons, the dissolution of powers and possessions and the loss of territory, the dangers of hunger and of damages to the body, the failure of hopes and the falsification of beliefs, the awareness of wrongdoing and the risk of being in the wrong, chaos and the bewilderingness of the cosmos, civil disorder, and above all, deaththe fear of death as much as its occurrencethese are the tribulations of man. The sufferings they cause embrace both the pain of what has already happened and been experienced, and the terror of what has not yet happened but is certain to happenas death is certainor, like the loss of honor, power, and possessions, might happen, but not inevitably. Crises are situations in the lives of individuals, corporate groups, or societies in which the performance of established routines is rendered more difficult than ordinarily by the heightening of such tribulations, or situations in which anticipations of what is regarded as appropriate and legitimate are more frustrated or rendered more improbable than usual. Crises themselves can become predictable and efforts made to avert them or to render them less burdensome (e.g., by insurance or by planning). Because of the chronic incompatibility of many demands for the same scarce and much sought-after objects, because of the limitations of knowledge and foresight, and because aging and death are inevitable, individual men and their societies always live in a state of crisis. But there are crises and crises, and some are more severe than others. Let us look at some of the non-empirical defenses that are built to cope with crisis.

Ritual, Ceremonial, Etiquette Ritual is a stereotyped, symbolically concentrated expression of beliefs and sentiments regarding ultimate things. It is a way of renewing contact with ultimate things, of bringing more vividly to the mind through symbolic performances certain centrally important processes and norms. Ultimate things are those which are beyond the ordinary, sensibly evident sequences of events; they govern or are thought to govern these events and offer guidance and imperatives to action. Ultimate things are sacred things. Ordinary, sensibly evident sequences of events vary in the extent to which they arouse the need to be related to sacred things. Those events which are closest to the generation, reproduction, and cessation of the vitality of individuals and collectivities are among the most likely to arouse the need for connection with sacred things. .Empirically observable events which contradict or infringe on those rules of life which designate the right relationship with sacred things also call forth the need to reaffirmand reinterpretthat relationship. Deprivations already experienced and dangers of future deprivations activate the need for contact with ultimate things, with higher powers.

156 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus many of us have been in the past fifty years, in utilitarian traditions. Ritual is regarded as useless, as "mere ritual" on the same level as "incantation," which also has a bad name. Ritual is regarded as dangerous to adaptive action because it is "rigid." It is thought to be insincere; it is accused of failure to express actually experienced emotions or states of mind. In an age in which intellectuals, under Freudian influence, prize affective spontaneity, ritual is derogated as "compulsive." It is thought to be lacking in "genuineness"; it is charged with being "hollow," "external." Its traditional cognitive content is a burden; there is a certain embarassment in its presence, even on the part of many who enjoy participation in ritual practices, because it is integral to particular beliefs which they either do not share or do not wish to acknowledge, or to a category of existence which they have been educated to disregard or dispute. It is thought that ritual is "out of touch with the times," that our time is inherently alien to ritual, and that rituals existing in this society are no more than survivals from the past, without value except as "spectacles." Ritual, then, which in one form or another has been present in every epoch of human society has come in our own to be regarded as having no legitimate place in the economy of human life. Its name is blackened by its association with "magic," superstition, myth, religion, priestly ministrations, and submissiveness to divine authority. If ritual were only expressive, as Asian dances are thought to be, then it might have some chance of appreciation; but it instead has cognitive and moral contents of problematic associations, and on these accounts it is discredited. Cognttively, ritual speaks on behalf of cosmologies that are scientifically unacceptable; morally it involves conceptions of the sources of right and wrong that are repugnant to contemporary educated opinion. The culture which is regarded by its most eminent figures as irreligious and wholly secular finds no place for ritual in its own society, even though it makes many steps forward in the study of rituals in other societies. Nonetheless there is still a considerable amount of ritual performance in contemporary Western societies. Much of it is of the traditional variety, associated with churches, but there is much else. The exercise of great authority which is constructed to maintain order, to protect and enhance life, and to deal therefore with great vicissitudes of individual and collective existence, continues to be surrounded by ritual. When a presidentis inaugurated, even in a country which believes that it has freed itself from the encrustations of aristocratic ceremonial and etiquette, the ritual is quite elaborate. There is a complex'etiquette involved in approaching presidents and prime ministers. When a president or a prime minister dies and receives a "state funeral,'' a ritual performance which goes far beyond conventional or traditional religious requirements is enacted. National anniversaries like 14 July or 4 July or 7 November are

Ritual and Crisis 157 republican rituals which cannot be accounted for if one views them as nothing more than survivals. Judges in law courts are embedded in ritual; the higher the court, the richer the ritual. The practice of the legal profession is highly ritualized. ArmieisJill insist on considerable ritual, particularly at the higher levels of authority. Many universities, and not just the ancient universities of the United Kingdom, have extensive ceremonials; many universities which do not have them seem, from time to time, to feel deficient for not having some. Still, is there any university which simply sends through the post a mimeographed notice to a former student attesting that he has just completed his course of study, thereby eschewing convocation and degree-granting rituals? Even secondary schools think they need such rituals to mark the passage from one stage of life to the next Rituals do not exist only in institutions with a long and continuing tradition from a ritually more amply provided past. They also come into existence in new institutions and in the personal relations of individuals. Rudimentary rituals which have not been acquired through tradition certainly exist in families and are asserted to confirm family identity and continuity. Christenings and anniversaries seem to be reassurances against the often-felt danger of dissolution about which senior members of families are sometimes apprehensive. Crises of transition from one stage to another in the course of the life of ordinary human beings tend to be ritualized. The poverty of civil marriage ceremonies is often felt acutely by those whose religious convictions are too faint to allow them to be married in church. Even the deliberately antiritualist Soviet Union has decided to provide a Hall of Marriages so that marriage rituals may be performed with appropriate seriousness. And what of funeralsand the desperate improvisation of ritual-like performances among those who have fallen away from the churches and who do not believe in immortality and the resurrection of the dead? Modern "secular" society contains a great deal of newly generated ritual, quite apart from the religious and political ritual "surviving" from an allegedly more ritualist past It is very probable that there are fewer ritual acts per capita practiced nowadays than there were several centuries ago. Religious observances in church and hearth, ritual in monarchical and aristocratic institutions, and in emulatory nonmonarchical regimes-^-all of which were highly ritualizedhave declined in frequency, both within individual careers and among individuals in whole societies. There is less church-going nowadays in the sense that smaller proportions of the population attend religious services now than four centuries ago. Not many monarchies survive as compared with a century ago; aristocracies and courts have gone, too. Families appear to be more informal and more equalitarianand equalitarianism has in recent centuries been part of the rejection of authority and of the ritual in which it tends to become embedded.

w 158 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus Ritual and Crisis 159 individual death, is by no means improbable and represents a far more comprehensive annihilation. There are other crises, for example, those resulting from the rapid growth of population, the expansion of the scale of society and corporate bodies, the automation of industry, and the prospect of a workless life for a large proportion of the members of society, the strain of urban life in increasingly urbanized societies, the intensity of activity attendant on the growth of affluence and opportunity. These are crises to some persons; we are already living in the midst of many of them and some persons regard them as normal. Such crises grow gradually and imperceptibly. They are very unevenly effective and hence many persons do not experience them at all as deprivations. Remedies or preventive measures, although not easy to imagine, seem at least to fall within human powers, so that even for those who see them as crises, there exists at least some possibility of rational action to avert them or at least to avert their worst consequences. The other miseries which afflict the human raceaccidental death and maiming, civil disorder, natural disasters, poverty, illness, unhappinesshave always existed. They are crises to those to whom they occur, but they are usually segregated. There are more specific actions which can be taken to avoid or to remedy or compensate for some of them. They cannot in any sense be called modern crises, yet it is possible that heightened sensitivity and hedonism, and the more widespread expectation of a better human life over much of the earth's surface, have caused these ancient catastrophes and adumbrations of death to be experienced more painfully than used to be the case. How have men reacted to these crises, particularly to those which are specifically modern? Have they engendered new patterns of belief and new ritual modes of defense? The quantitative social survey evidence is not very decisive, in part because it does not go back far enough in time to enable us to compare different periods of time with respect to the frequency of ritual activity, and in part because the evidence deals with only one type of ritual practice, namely, formal religious observance. Impressions are equivocal. On the one hand, one is impressed by the expansion of church attendance in the United States in almost all sectors of society, by the major role played by Christian parties in the political life of Western Europe since the war, arid by the extraordinarily diminished hostility of intellectuals toward religion in the period since the Second World War. On the other hand, one is struck also by the repeated observations, especially in Britain but also on the continent of Europe, concerning the meaninglessness of religious ritual, and by the extent to which some of the most important branches of Western Christianity have begun to acknowledge in one form or another the validity of these observations. There is no indication of an increase in church attendance in the United Kingdom or on the continent. Nonetheless the increased interest in

Is it likely that this trend toward the further diminution of ritual practice will continue until ritual becomes extinct in our society? Death, War, Other Miseries Crises are times of danger in the lives of societies, institutions, and individuals. Rituals are parts of systems of belief directed toward averting danger and fortifying the individual to face it by reaffirming connections with the most fundamental realities or norms, and by interpreting the danger in such a way as to make it coherent with the universe as understood in the body of beliefs of which the ritual is a part. Rituals are therefore parts of a systematic response to crises, actual and anticipated. Let us begin with death, which preoccupies every system of belief about the position of man in the world and which enters into so many of the rituals that are parts of such systems of belief. Death is still a certainty for every living human being but is not as omnipresent a threat in present-day advanced societies as it was before the relatively recent improvements in preventive medicine, nutrition, and obstetrics. I am inclined to think that this is one of the most important factors in the relative decline in religious belief and ritual observance which has occurred in the course of the past century. Scientism has probably contributed to the erosion of religious belief and ritual participation in the educated classes, but in the mass of the population science has influenced religious belief, not through direct confrontation but through its contribution to medical practice. But as if to compensate for this, there is now the danger of nuclear war. The possibility of such war is the cause of the greatest crisis the human race has ever confronted, apart from death itself. Death is a permanent certainty, and the permanence and the certainty have, over a long time, permitted a development of beliefs and rituals to alleviate to some small extent the terror that death inevitably inspires. Now that the belief in personal immortality and the ultimate resurrection of the dead no longer has the subscription of as large a proportion of the population as it once presumably did, one of the mechanisms which makes the thought of death a little more tolerable is belief in the survival of the collectivity and its culture. The danger of nuclear war destroys that consolation because it offers the prospect of death, individual and collective, simultaneously and certainly. Furthermore, the danger of nuclear war came upon mankind suddenly and dramatically, about thirty years ago. Measures which might be taken to reduce the losses inflicted in a nuclear war once it has occurred seem trivial. The techniques of its prevention, given the other attachments of human beings, are indeterminate. Thus in a sense, mankind, at least in the industrialized countries, faces a danger which, though not as certain as

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> religious matters seems significant There seems to be, despite dissatisfaction or indifference toward inherited theologies and liturgies, a greater general appreciation of religion. It is difficult to say whether this sympathy extends more to unexpungeable religious needs of human beings or to the possible truth of some as yet unarticulated body of religious belief. A new ritual style or idiom, freed from associations with symbols which are no longer congenial, has not been created to correspond to the religious curiosity or sensitivity which is now being more widely and openly expressed. Yet I have an impression that many more or less "secular" persons regret the lack of an acceptable ritual. Ritual continues to have a bad name in intellectual circles. But its total absence in grave situations strikes contemporaries as anomalous, even where they find the inherited ritual to be repugnant Rational contrivance has not been able to devise rituals which, it is felt, possess the gravity of those having some substantive affinity with the very beliefs no longer regarded as credible.

Ritual and Crisis 161 hand, Japanese society, which is still one of the most ritualized in many spheres of life, has shown exceptional adaptability over the past century. Germany, too, which has been for a long time among the most ritualized of Western societies, has shown great vigor and skill in adaptation to the circumstances of the 1950s and 1960s. Unfortunately, in the present state of my knowledge, nothing much can be said, with respect to contemporary advanced societies, about the influence of ritual practices on the conduct of those who partake of them. It is difficult to say whether ritual participation does in fact fortify the participants against deprivations by strengthening their beliefs and their institutional attachments. Such influence as ritual practice might have on conduct is undoubtedly subtle and it is not massive or decisive. It probably does help to remind its participants of the gravity of some aspects of existence, and recalls to them some fundamental rules and symbols of a pattern of life. But in large-scale societies ritual is only one among many factors that activate fundamental normative orientations and images in human beings; and the maintenance of this state of activation requires constant support from authoritative institutions and environing opinion, quite independently of ritual practice. In smaller, less differentiated societies in which the religious community, the lineage, and the society are coterminous, participation in a religious ritual is also participation in a ritual of the whole society. In such a situation it is reasonable to think that ritual participation heightens directly the solidarity of the whole society. In large-scale, advanced societies of the present day, with their high degree of pluralism, of specialization of institutions, and of segmentation of roles, participation in religious ritual probably cannot start a series of ripples which will run throughout all the individual roles and to all sectors of the societies. Still, even present-day societies are not so disaggregated that there is no connection among their various cultural and institutional centers. The affirmation of a connection with the center of the universe in a religious ritual within the framework of a church which belongs to the central institutional system might well have some reinforcing repercussions on the participants' relations with the center of the political system. But alone and unaided, in a society in which every other factor is hostile to the effectiveness of the central institutional system, ritual participation will not be a decisive factor. Nonetheless, the importance of ritual in any large society lies in its expression of an intended commitment to the serious element of existence, to the vital powers and norms which it is thought should guide the understanding and conduct of life. It belongs to the category of actions like the creation of works of art, music, or literature. Ritual is an expressive act, but the forms of ritual expression are, for those who participate in them, prescribed by liturgical tradition. Their individuality must be fitted into the frame provided by tradition. Whereas works of art, literature, and music are produced in traditions which praise

The Effectiveness of Ritual Does this "ritual deficit" and the discomfiture about it make any important difference in the life of contemporary man? Numerous students have emphasized that ritual is not technological. It is not part of a chain of means and ends; it is not instrumental in any empirical sense. Even though rituals might be mechanisms of defense against dangers, the dangers they seek to mitigate have frequently had their way. The strength of ritual practice, which, according to theory, affirms and renews the solidarity of the community of participants, has not in the past proved sufficient to prevent the institutions within which they were practiced from foundering or falling into catastrophe. Armies have lost their solidarity and governments have often been indecisive even though their ritual practices were "adequate" according to the conceptions of the time and the experts of the ritual. It is said that ritual, because it follows a prescribed pattern, tends to force conduct outside its own structure into a similar rigidity and thus has a stabilizing effect on the social order. The stability thus fostered allegedly contributes to adaptability to external necessities. There is unfortunately no worthwhile evidence on this important problem. Rigidity of conduct is certainly possible without ritual practice. The governments of the United States, China, and the Soviet Union, none of which is thought to be highly ritualized in its proceduresor conduct, have all shown considerably more rigidity than many outside judges regard as appropriate to the very dangerous situation in which they are participating. It is said of modern British society, which is certainly less ritualized than it was one or two hundred years ago, that it is unable to adapt itself to the new situation of Britain in the world. On the other

162 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus individual creativity and genius, ritual belongs to a tradition in which religion and art are fused. Those who practice established traditional rituals are reproducers and the experience of the ritual lacks the immediacy of feeling an expressive work gives to its creator. Yet despite this mediated character, it does express a form of cognitive contact with the serious core of reality. Human beings are probably not much less impressed now by la vie serieuse, as Durkheim called it, than they were in earlier stages of human history. They are, however, less continuously so, because as was pointed out earlier, until the emergence of nuclear weapons the threat of death had become less continuously present. Further reasons for the decline in ritual practice may be seen in the diminished persuasiveness of the symbolic idiom which is used in our inherited rituals as well as in the equalitarian hostility toward rituals connected with hieratic, monarchical, and aristocratic structures of authority. The Survival of Ritual If ritual practice is nowadays relatively marginal and intermittent in its significance for conduct, and if so many of our rituals are connected to a theology and liturgy and systems of authority to which commitments are no longer so firm, it might be asked whether ritual will survive. I venture the opinion that, in a variety of ways, it will survive. As long as the category of the "serious" remains in human life, there will be a profound impulse to acknowledge and express an appreciation of the "seriousness" which puts the individual into contact with words and actions of symbolic import. It is this sense of the "serious" which constitutes the religious impulse in man. This I regard as given in the constitution of man in the same way that cognitive powers are given or locomotive powers are given. Like those, they are unevenly given and unevenly cultivated, so that the sense of the "serious," the need for contact with the charismatic or sacred values, differs markedly among human beings within any society. Some persons, a minority, tend to have it to a pronounced degree and even relatively continuously; others, far more numerous, will experience it only intermittently and, except rarely, without great intensity. Finally there is a minority which is utterly opaque to the serious. (The matter is far more complicated than it is presented here. There is frivolity in its two senses of sacrilegiousness and "unseriousness"; there is deliberate and serious atheism and anticlericalism and utterly "unserious" indifference toward the sacred. 1 think, however, that these are only variants of the rough classification previously described.) To satisfy this universal need for contact with sacred values, for many persons the inheritance of religious beliefs with which our dominant rituals are associated will probably continue to serve. They have already

Ritual and Crisis 163 shown much greater tenacity than nineteenth-century positivists and utilitarians assumed. The need for order, and for meaning in order, are too fundamental in man for the human race as a whole to allow itself to be bereft of the rich and elaborate scheme of metaphorical interpretation of existence which is made available by the great world religions. The spread of education and of scientific knowledge, as well as the improved level of material well-being, will not eradicate them unless those who have these religions in their charge lose their self-confidence because of the distrust the highly educated hold toward the inherited metaphors. The significance of authority is not going to diminish either, nor will the vicissitudes which endanger human life and which infringe on the foundations of morally meaningful order. As long as the biological organism of man passes through stages resembling those now known to us, there will be transitions from one stage to the next; each successive stage will require some sort of consecration to mark its seriousness. Nor will the spirits embodied in nuclear weapons ever allow themselves to be put back into Pandora's box. Mankind will never be able to forget the fact that the means for its very large-scale and almost instantaneous destruction exist and will continue to exist And with this will be attendant a sense of need to reaffirm the moral standards through which mankind might be protected from this monstrous danger. There will be a need for ritual because there is a need to reaffirm contact with the stratum of the "serious" in human existence. But the question is whether a new type of ritual which expresses the same persistent preoccupations in a new symbolic idiom will emerge. It is possible that the need for ritual will exist in varying degrees of intensity but that an acceptable ritual will not come into existence and become newly traditionalized, because, on the one hand, the system of beliefs which engendered the inherited ritual is no longer acceptable, and, on the other, the new beliefs about the "serious" will not find a widely acknowledged idiom or custodianship intellectually, morally, and aesthetically capable of precipitating a new ritual.

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Consensus 165 10 Consensus The beliefs with respect to which consensus may exist include both cognitive propositions and propositions which "apply" moral standards concerning the justice or injustice of the distribution of roles, facilities, and rewards in the society and of the institutions of authority and order whereby these distributions are brought about, maintained, and changed. The beliefs which may enter into consensus include beliefs about the Tightness of the qualifications of those in authority to exercise it, and of those receiving different amounts of the unequally distributed, valued objects to receive what they do; these in turn entail beliefs about the legitimacy of the institutions through which the bearers of authority and the recipients of the different shares are selected; The sense of unity which is an essential component of consensus is a primary cognitive image in which the boundaries of the self, at least at a certain level of consciousness, are so defined as to incorporate named or anonymous symbols of the society as a whole. In a condition of macrosocial consensus, the sense of unity extends from those who possess it, whatever their own position, to strata of the population very differently situated in the distributions of rewards and facilities and very different in their share in the exercise of authority. The Reference of Consensus and Dissensus Consensual and dissensual beliefs operate in the minds of particular individual persons who are in face-to-face interaction and who are in competition for scarce values, and they refer accordingly to the collectivities formed by those in face-to-face interaction. ("Competition" here includes "ecological competition." It does not refer only to "competitive" attitudes or states of mind.) Among, for example, workers on a shop floor, and between workers and supervisors within a factory or firm, among members of different parties in parliaments, or among members of different factions within a political party, consensus is at work alongside of dissensus concerning the distributions of valued objects among them. Consensual and dissensual beliefs refer also to macrosocial distributions exceeding the radius of circles of face-to-face interaction. The consensus which is operative in these face-to-face situations is ordinarily, although not always, a "derivative" of beliefs which have the wider macrosocial range of reference; there is probably also some causal influence of judgments of microsocial distributions on judgments of macrosocial distributions. The consensual and dissensual beliefs which refer to the wider or macrosocial distribution usually refer to distributive classes or strata, and when particular individuals are referred to, it is as representative instances of classes and not as particular individuals. (The classes discerned and distinguished are often characterized not only by their position in the particular distribution of the rich, the poor, the eminent, the obscure, the

Order and Belief Beliefs have internal patterns and they have a social structure. By the social structure of beliefs I mean the relationshipinteractive as well as genetic or derivativeof the beliefs of one individual or one class of individuals with the beliefs of other individuals or classes of individuals. Whereas in the study of the internal pattern of beliefs we are concerned with such properties as logical consistency, in the study of the social structure of beliefs we are concerned with the factual compatibility of the actions of the different individuals or classes of individuals who hold the beliefs in question. Actions, since they involve beliefs, both cognitive and moral, in their constitution bear some approximate correlation with beliefs. For this reason, any consideration of the different combinations of solidarity, separation, and conflict which characterize any human collectivitiesstates, parties, churches, etc.is compelled to take account of the social structure of beliefs. The main terms of the analysis of the social structure of beliefs are consensus and dissensus.

Definition of Consensus Consensus is a condition of agreement in the interindividual and in the intergroup structure of beliefs of a society. By group here I mean any plurality of individuals, such as a social stratum, a tribe, a body of adherents of a church or sectindeed any subsystem within a larger society. Consensus exists when a large proportion of the adult members of a society, more especially a large proportion of those concerned with and capable of influencing decisions regarding the procedure and substance of allocations of authority, status, rights, wealth and income, and other important and scarce values about which conflict might occur, (1) are in agreement in their beliefs about what decisions should be made about these issues and about the range within which they may disagree, and (2) also have some feeling of affinity with each other and the larger society as a whole. Consensus exists when there is acceptance of the institutions through which decisions reached after disagreements have been resolved are made or executed. Consensus exists when "objectively" deprivational allocations are accepted on grounds other than the expectation of coercion for the enforcement of acceptance. Consensus is usually accompanied by a low level of hostile affect about disagreements within the circle of those sharing the consensus.

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Consensus 167 exercised and in which the emblems of the society are embodied and exhibited and from which much of the culture of the society is diffused. Consensus is thus affirmative toward the general shape of the existing distribution of values, and toward the institutional system which influences the distribution of values, including the incumbents of the most authoritative roles in that institutional system. The sense of identification which is essential in macrosocial consensus includes some component of self-identification with symbols of the center. There are indeed occasions when the prevailing system of authority becomes the object of a widely shared negative consensus, although in such situations the negative consensus is unorganized. This paradoxical situation of a dissensual consensus is characteristic of transitional situations in which the center has lost much of its efficacy but still appears to retain sufficient coherence to exercise coercive power. The results of the exercise of its sovereign authority are not "believed in." Insofar as a widespread consensus exists in a society, it usually more or less affirms the existing system of authoritative institutions and the distributions associated with them. It does so because authority, when it is effective, tends to establish its own legitimacy. Its coercive power too helps it to call forth a conformity or obedience which justifies itself in part by an acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the powerful. Perhaps even more important is the close affinity of outlook of the central cultural system with the central institutional system, and this, through teaching and exemplification, tends to diffuse itself into the outlooks and the programs of large parts of the society. This consensus which affirms the center is capable of containing a considerable amount of dissensus with respect to the center on many particular issues. Where the dissensus vis-a-vis the center is operative with respect to a great number of particular issues, the consensual affirmation of the center loses its capacity to contain dissensus. When the many individual and group dissensual beliefs become similar to each other, we may speak of a dissensual consensus. This is a situation in which revolutions occur or in which regimes abdicate or permit themselves to be peacefully even if not consitutionally displaced. The Range and Scope of Consensus and Dissensus In principle, the social structure of beliefs of a society could range from complete consensus of all the adult members to their complete dissensus and from there to a complete dissensual consensus; it could range from a situation in which everyone is in agreement with everyone else at all times on all distributive issues and is in a completely solidary relationship with the whole society, including, of course, its center, to a situation in which no one agrees with anyone on anything at any time and is in a completely apathetic or antagonistic relationship with everyone else, and finally to a

educated and the uneducated, the rulers and the ruled, the skilled and the unskilled, but by other associated properties as well such as ethnic, linguistic or cultural, e.g., Negroes, whites, Ibos, Yorubas, Africans,r^ Asians, etc.) The immediate reference of consensual and dissensual judgments need not necessarily be to the entire range of the distribution; they might refer simply to the particular classes or strata in which each of the parties in a face-to-facemicrosocialrelationship is included. Macrosocial consensual and dissensual beliefs might refer only to the stratum of the individual expressing the beliefs and to those strata which are higher in the distribution. Strata which are lower in the distribution are referred to by the persons expressing their beliefs either when the lower strata are expressing claims which would diminish the superior position of the higher stratum in the distribution, or when a member or members of a higher stratum are seeking to increase their share or to raise their position in a distribution, or when a judgment of the justice or injustice of the shape or other properties of the distribution is under consideration. Relatively few persons are in face-to-face interaction with those who are remote from them in the macrosocial distributions of income, power, deference, etc., but it is to these larger distributions that much attention is given and "serious" beliefs are held. Individuals are capable of perceiving the approximate dimensions of these larger or macrosocial distributions and of passing judgment on their rightfulness; indeed, the greatest importance is attributed to these distributions. Individuals, even those of limited experience, knowledge, and imagination, are capable of perceiving in a vague way their own location or the location of the stratum to which they assign themselves within this larger, macrosocial distribution. Human beings are capable of, and many are strongly inclined to render, judgments about situations in which they themselves are not direct and active participants. Intellectual and moral sensibility impels them to judge the larger distributions of their society as decisive of the quality of their society and as determinative of the attitudes which they should take toward it. The fact that beliefs about distribution are fundamentally beliefs about power, and thus about charismawhich draws attention to itself and which urgently demands judgmentmakes macrosocial distributions into objects of serious beliefs. The contention about the distributions which directly affect or are thought directly to affect the persons involved is often justified or arises from beliefs about macrosocial distributions, i.e., about justice in society. \ The Center of Society as the Reference of Consensus and Dissensus Consensus, in the special macrosocial sense in which it is used in this paper, is always consensus with and about the center of society, i.e., the network of roles and institutions through which sovereign authority is

168 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus situation in which the entire society except those in positions of central authority are in agreement on everything including their hostility toward the center. These three conceptual or definitional possibilities of complete consensus, complete dissensus, and complete dissensual consensus are, of course, extremely improbable empirically. Every real, enduring, and frequently recurrent situation in society is a mixture of consensus and dissensus. The situations of any society are variations of this mixture. The empirically possible mixtures vary with respect to issues on which agreement and disagreement exists, the combinations of issues which are agreed and disagreed on, the proportions of the population and sectors of the society which are within a consensual sector on any given issue, the stability of the boundaries of the consensual and dissensual sectors of the society, the intensity of affect associated with agreement or disagreement, the magnitude of agreement and disagreement about particular issues and combinations of issues. (Corresponding variations exist with respect to the sense of affinity.) Even on those matters in a society about which there is most consensus, there is inevitably dissensus as well. Some of the dissensus is active in its negation of the prevailing view. Active dissensus or dissent is also usually more articulated than consensus. Active and articulated dissensus, like consensus but perhaps even more, so might be described as a central peak or peaks surrounded by a series of concentric circles of diminishing degrees of activity and articulatedness. In the outermost circles, in the most low-lying foothills, around the peaks of consensus and dissensus are areas of apathy. Apathy may be described as a condition in which beliefs about central things do not exist or exist extremely faintly and intermittently to the point of extreme rarity and quite without affect. The apathetic are those who do not care: they are the "don't care's" even more than they are the "don't know's." It is not that they "don't care" about anything; only that they do not care much about the center of society. They might on occasion and if pressed by questions or circumstances bring some beliefs about the center to the surface of consciousness. But if left to themselves and not pressed by events and very tangible opportunities, they will not by themselves develop or express such beliefs. Those who are apathetic about the center are a fluctuating proportion of the members of a society. They are on occasion galvanized into dissensus or consensus because such possibilities are latent in them and because in one way or another membership in any society entails being touched from time to time by some manifestation of the center. The Articulatedness of Consensus Consensus is manifested in conduct governed by beliefs, in situations in

Consensus 169 which conflicts would occur or in which they would be more acute but for the existence of consensus. Consensual action derives from the common adherence to laws, rules, and norms. It is supported by attachment to the institutions which promulgate and apply the laws and rules and a widespread sense, experienced by individuals, of their common identity or unity, which by disclosing to them those features in respect to which they are similar, diminishes the significance of, the differences on which dissensus and hostile sentiments would otherwise concentrate. (These three elements may, within limits, vary independently. The strength of any one, however, helps to strengthen the others.) These three constituents of consensus usually manifest themselves negatively. By that I mean that they operate to restrict the intensity and range of conflict. Their affirmation is seldom made explicit, except where adduced to justify limitations on interindividually or intercollectively incompatible demands which have already been expressed. They are rarely articulated when they function to prevent potential demands from being generated or expressed. Since consensus exists in the realm of the taken-for-granted, of the tacitly accepted, it is observable primarily in its consequences in restraining conflict which in contrast with consensus is ordinarily more articulated. The Bringing into Consciousness of Consensual and Dissensual Beliefs The adjudication of particular conflicts between individuals or groups of individuals of adjacent strata in face-to-face relationships or between the representative members of corporate bodies, such as political parties or trade unions, is often brought about and justified by reference to norms and maxims which have a more general validity and a wider, more consensual acceptance. (Resistance to adjudication in such concrete contexts is also justified by reference to such general norms or maxims.) The articulation of consensual beliefs is often the accomplishment of elites, of primordial or civil or corporate authorities, of representatives who ascend to their roles through a formalized institutional process of selection or election or by some other process. The same obtains for dissensual beliefs. The process of articulation is also a process which renders beliefs more active, in the sense of being more compelling of fulfillment in action. It is in the encounters of elites that the interindividual or intergroup structure of beliefs becomes particularly significant for the order and disorder of a society. The macrosocial elites, who are directly involved in the central institutional and cultural systems are especially important in the working of consensus and dissensus, because the social structure of their beliefs tangibly affects the efficacy of the central institutions and because of their influence on their followers. But the influence of micro-

'^ 170 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus social elites among those for whom they are elitesan ascendant personality in a circle of friends, a dominant father or elder brother in a kinship group, a vigorous personality in a team of workmenaffects the macrosocial beliefs of the "rank and file" members of the group. In most groups, macrosocial beliefs are less salient in the outlook of the rank and file than they are in the outlook of the elites. The elites, therefore, by their exemplification of these beliefs, might instigate conduct which approximates actions impelled by the beliefs, although the actions are in fact motivated more by attachment to the "elite" than by the strength of the belief which the actor experiences. But the elites might also render the macrosocial beliefs themselves more salient; that is, they might bring them forward in the consciousness of their followers. Both processes can occur simultaneously and work in the same direction. The result might foster either consensus or dissensus or both simultaneously. The Relevance of Consensual Beliefs about Matters Other than Allocations and the Center Macrosocial consensus by definition does not include such beliefs as those which refer to the right order of personal relationships, the proper objects of aesthetic experience and judgment, the origin and structure of the cosmos, and the nature and powers of divinity. Nonetheless, it is quite possible, perhaps even likely, that where consensus exists with respect to such beliefs, the macrosocial consensus in which we are interested is more probable and enduring. Until the emergence of the modern liberal state with its plurality of religious bodies, with diverse political parties, the separation of powers, and institutions for the conduct and control of class and other sectional conflicts, rulers tended to believe that a consensus of religious beliefs was a necessary condition of the consensus required for social order, i.e., for peace in the polity. This view ceased to be regarded as valid in the liberal constitutional regimes of the nineteenth century. The things about which consensus was thought necessary were reduced in number. Yet it is quite plausible that some measure of consensus of beliefs apart from those about the justice or injustice of the distribution of scarce and desired objects helps to create and maintain the vague sense of unity which is an essential part of consensus. There is perhaps a deeper truth hidden in the quip which asserted that England was a "country of a hundred religions and one sauce." The approximate uniformity of standards of taste among the politically concerned or active sections of the population might have contributed to the sense of unity in those sections of the population and thus enabled a macrosocial consensus of those sections to function despite the divisions concerning politics, theology, and ecclesiastical organization and the right distribution of rewards and facilities. A consensus regarding those components of culture which do not refer Consensus 171 directly to macrosocial allocative problems probably contributes to consensus regarding such allocations because it fortifies the sense of affinity within the consensual community and thus renders dissensual beliefs less divisive and less significant in generating conflict. Consensus and Ideology A rigorously coherent pattern of actually held, abstract or general, metaphysical, ethical, and political beliefs, explicitly held and systematically espoused ("ideology"), can affect the state of consensus of a society since it contains judgments concerning particular issues of legitimacy, distribution, selection, etc. A situation of widespread consensus, in which such an ideology, ratiocinatively or affectively arrived at, explicitly and comprehensively dominates all or most particular actions, is by no means impossible. Still, such a situation is relatively rare and short-lived in any society. Nonetheless, human beings assess the actions and orientations of themselves and other persons in general categories, and their general assessments give some measure of direction to their immediate response to the smaller and larger orders of which they and these other persons are a part. General ethical standards, vague notions of the right ordering of life, the conceptions of the virtues which entitle men to power, deference, and other rewards and facilities, do have some influence on concrete responses to particular issues. These concrete responses are also functions of the actually perceived, or imagined distribution of power, calculations of the relative advantage of alternative courses of action, and of course the sense of affinity or disjunction. The general beliefs which enter into any existent consensus might derive genetically and historically from an ideology, but at the moment of their action in a functioning consensus they are usually not clearly articulated or systematically ordered. They are expressed sometimes in maxims, sometimes in ambiguous terms like "fairness" without specific content These vague maxims and terms are often formulated negatively, repudiating particular kinds of action but not indicating what is positively right. The corpus of law, which is the most articulated precipitate of consensus, is not an ideology although it might have been influenced by ideologies. It is full of gaps and is probably never entirely coherent in a logical sense. What is more, the specific imperatives and prohibitions contained in statute law and in judicial decisions are far more differentiated than the beliefs actually "believed" by those who share in any macrosocial consensus. In societies with written constitutions, the beliefs and rules which these contain have some correspondence with certain sections of the prevailing consensus, but the correspondence is only approximate and uneven. Accordingly, consensual belief structures tend to be more pluralistic in

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Consensus 173 does it depend upon universal participation or high levels of salience and intensity for it to be effective in the maintenance of order. Of course no adult member of society is outside the system of allocation of scarce roles, facilities, and rewards, and as a result no adult, unless he is utterly, indeed almost catatonically, apathetic, can entirely avoid rendering judgments at least about that sector of the distribution which he perceives immediately around him. The judgments which he renders, however narrow their range of reference, are not, however, random vis-a-vis those current in the culture of his society. His interest in the larger distribution and the problems of legitimacy associated with it might be very faint and infrequent. Low salience and intermittence are quite compatible with consensuahty. Since one of the main foci of consensus is the system of allocation of the whole society, those persons who do not concern themselves much or intensely with the macrosocial allocation may be said to be somewhat marginal in the structure of consensus. Even where they share the general beliefs about what is "fair," etc., the fact that they apply them only or primarily to their immediate environment, and not to the larger society, means that they do not participate in the consensus to the same extent and in the same way as those who apply the consensually shared norms more intensely and frequently to the macrosocial system of allocation. Within a structure of consensual belief some adherents might be unswervingly insistent on the fulfillment of the obligations which the beliefs impose; they might, alternatively, not be so insistent on the realization of the normative directives of the beliefs. These differences in intensity of adherence to a particular belief might vary considerably through a single structure of belief; component beliefs might be very stringently insisted upon, others less so. Correspondingly, within a given collectivity or a given society some of the adherents of a particular consensual pattern of belief might have a high average level of intensity of adherence, others might have a lower average level. There will be marked differences in the salience of beliefs among the different strata of a collectivity or a society, even though they are consensual. There will moreover be differences between strata in modes of adherence to the various beliefs which make up a pattern. Some sectors or strata of a consensual structure will place more emphasis on one component belief; other sectors or strata will lay greater emphasis on another component belief. The consensual belief structure of a collectivity within a society, or of a whole society, is thus very heterogeneous. Every consensus is constituted by beliefs about a number of objects or issues, such as beliefs about the right principles of remuneration, the proper shape of particular distributions (equality and inequality), the prerogatives of property ownership, the propriety of incumbency by certain individuals and classes of individuals in certain positions on

the sense that they espouse various patterns of beliefs which are not wholly consistent with each other and which are able to coexist quite easily as long as each of them is adhered to only within limits, narrower than what the beliefs literally assert Thus, in contemporary Western liberal societies, both equality and liberty are believed to be very important as criteria for assessment of policies and distributions, and there is much consensus about both of them, particularly as long as each of them is adhered to in a limited fashion. They remain vague indicators of a direction or tendency rather than specific imperatives, and a substantial consensus can be maintained between those sections of society which incline more toward one than toward the otheras long as neither of the divergent parties insists on their thoroughgoing observance. Dissensual patterns of belief are more often explicit and systematic, that is, they are often more ideological, than the consensual patterns which affirm the existing central institutional system. The more dissensual it is, the greater the likelihood of explicitness and systematic coherence in a pattern of belief. Indeed, it might be said that the unideological character of the patterns of belief which enter into a consensual structure makes that consensus possible. The ambiguity of the central terms and beliefs permits diverse interpretations to be made, while those making the divergent interpretations retain some measure of adherence not only to the term or the belief in question but also to a residual element which is consensually shared with others from whom they diverge. Efforts to make the terms and beliefs more explicit and systematic might lead to a situation in which more weight is attributed to the dissensual elements at the cost of the residual consensual element. (The empirical analysis of the structure of consensus confronts the same difficulties as the empirical analysis of beliefs actually held by individuals. Because of their vagueness, ambiguity, unsystematic character, and variations in level of abstraction, actually held beliefs are difficult to describe, and there is a tendency on the part of sociological and anthropological analysts to systematize, clarify, and specify actually held beliefs to a point which makes the holders of such beliefs appear to be systematic philosophers or ideologists. Premises are rendered explicit, and particular judgments are generalized; as a result of this process, beliefs which they do not knowingly hold are imputed to the holders of actual beliefs. In doing so, analysts distort the nature of consensus and the mechanisms through which it operates.) \ The Internal Heterogeneity of Structures of Consensual Beliefs As said above, in no society, however consensual, is such consensus as exists ever universally and equally shared by all the adult members. Nor

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Consensus 175 consensual pattern of beliefs is borne in the first instance by a persisting "public" of adherents who gather around them, on particular issues and clusters of issues, extended and somewhat fluctuating but not wholly casual "publics." Some who are consensual on most issues are dissensual on a few; others who are dissensual on most issues are consensual on a few. From this determinateness of patterns of belief and the loose but real empirical interconnectedness of the objects or issues, an approximate stability of the "publics" is born.

particular distributions, the value of the total national community, etc., etc. Within the "public" of a consensus, some sectors might be attached intensely to their beliefs about all the issues, others intensely only to beliefs about some of them and faintly to beliefs about other issues, and some even might be attached to a very few and might repudiate most others. A common acceptance of certain of the beliefs might bind the entire "public" into a partial consensus, the partiality of which is a function of the extent to which other beliefs are repudiated and various contrary ones espoused by partially dissensual subsectors of that public. For example, nearly everyone in a given country might accept the legitimacy of the electoral system and of the authorities selected through it; they might also accept a particular unequal distribution of income; but they might disagree sharply about the distribution of deference and about the capacity of particular incumbents of authoritative roles to act beneficially on behalf of the society as a whole. Within a given society the constitution of the consensual public usually fluctuates. On one set of objects or issues, strata or sectors a.. .n might be in fairly homogeneous consensus; on another, strata or sectors c.. .g might be in a similarly homogeneous consensus, while with respect to a third object, strata or sectors f.. .s might be in such a consensus. With respect to a fourth object or issues, they might all be in the same consensus. Thus the various publics overlap; in this way dissensus is confined. Party politics in modern societies are organized efforts to shift the boundaries of the partial dissensus within the structure of a partial consensus. But alongside these deliberate efforts to change the structure of consensus, there is a continuously ongoing process of the shifting of boundaries. Beliefs about which there was once disagreement, e.g., concerning the right of the unemployed to public assistance, become consensual, while previously consensual beliefs, such as those concerning the right of the inheritance of property, become partially dissensual. These shifts in the structure of consensus in time arise in part from the struggles of the proponents of the partially dissensual programs, in part from demographic and technological changes which are accompanied by changes in occupational structure, and in part from the unfolding of the dynamic potentialities of various patterns of belief. These variations in the "public" of consensus, i.e., in the size of the population participating in it, testify also to the simultaneous coherence and incoherence in the patterns of the beliefs which individuals bring into a structure of consensus. If each individual had a perfectly systematized pattern of beliefs, those who disagreed with him in one particular belief would logically have to disagree with' him in all others. On the other hand, if this pattern of beliefs were totally incoherent, there would be no stability in the "publics" formed by the consensus of beliefs about a variety of objects or issues. Agreement on one issue would not entail any probability of agreement on any other. Yet as we know, every

The Function of Consensus Consensus maintains public order, i.e., it reduces the probability of the use of violence in the resolution of disagreements; it increases the amount of cooperation which is not impelled by fear of the coercive power of the stronger party. It does so (a) by the reduction of the probability of disagreements; (b) by narrowing the range of disagreements; (c) by confining the intensity of affect which accompanies beliefs and the softening of the rigidity of the attachment to the objects about which the disagreements exist; and (d) by the fostering of a readiness to accept peaceful modes of adjudicating disagreements among those who have a sense of their mutual affinity or identity. There is no natural harmony of interest among men in society. Men are diverse in their propensities, and the material and symbolic objects which they seek are scarce in relation to the demand for them. Their "interests" are in conflict. Furthermore, a societyparticularly a largescale societydifferentiated by wealth and power, by generations, by occupations, by status and culture, and by divergent primordial attachments will naturally tend toward differences in beliefs regarding the rightness of the actions of authority and the justice of the existing social order. Where it exists, consensus is a counterforce against the realization of the divisive potentialities of these incompatible "interests" and ideals. Consensus, to be effective, depends particularly on the consensus of beliefs of those persons, scattered throughout the society in many classes, regions, and occupations, who have a fairly frequent and salient concern (1) with the macrosocial distribution of roles, facilities, and rewards; (2) with particular decisions taken in the center of the society inasmuch as they affect these distributions or are affected by them; and (3) with the institutions in which these decisions are taken or which influence the distributions. The concern may take the form of institutionalized participation in the decisions bearing on these three aspects of distributive events or it may take the form of attitudinal involvement which affects action. Those who are concerned act on behalf of the strata and collectivities generated by the distributions, or on behalf of some ideal arrangement; they take it upon themselves or are institutionally entitled to pass judgment and to attempt to influence opinion and decision. Their

w 176 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus agreement or disagreement on particular issues can promote harmony or conflict in the working of institutions, and in the relationships of strata and collectivities within society. Public order and effective cooperation among the diverse parts of the society do not, however, require continuous consensus oh all topics, enfolding everyone among its adherents, even among the elites. What is important for the maintenance of order is that their disagreements about particular issues at a particular time should exist within a consensual matrix. This consensual matrix is maintained not only by consensual beliefs but to a large extent by a widespread sense of affinity of the individual members with each other as members of the society. This sense of oneness manifests itself in a sense of affinity with the other persons with whom there might be many particular disagreements. Coalitions of interests, the boundaries of which cut across each other, keep the sense of affinity from disintegrating. (Cleavages formed by the coincidence of boundaries of interest coalitions, on the other hand, do serious damage to the sense of affinity.) The capacity of the incumbent political elite to exercise coercion through the maintenance of a disciplined body of officials is another important element in the maintenance of order in society, but it never operates alone for any length of time. Without a strong consensual reinforcement, coercion could in itself never be effective. It is a supplement to consensus, not a mutually exclusive alternative. (The power to coerce is also a generator of consensus.) The Generation and Change of Consensus The family which inducts the newly born organism into society is the first instigator of consensus. Within the family the child acquires generalized and affirmative attitudes toward authority which are the preconditions of a subsequent assimilation into a consensus centered on authoritative institutions at the center of society. Socialization within the family also inculcates dissehsual attitudes and dispositions which lead to dissensual attitudes. But only relatively infrequently do families inculcate completely dissensual attitudes. In the school, the child acquires some of the culture of the larger society, some knowledge and appreciation of its heroes, its great events and its territorial scope. An image of the society as a whole is formed thereby. Great collective rituals which evoke images of the whole society in its most essential form repeatedly renew the sense of affinity with the larger society, and recurrent interaction with like-minded persons from childhood onward maintains and reinforces this generalized disposition to attribute validity to those who speak and act through the central institutional system and who speak on behalf of the central cultural system. As a result, a substantial proportion of the indigenous populaConsensus 111 tion grows into a consensual culture which accepts within a relatively circumscribed range of variation, the justice of existing distributions, the norms for judging them and the institutions for maintaining and changing them. But this approximate consensus never includes all of the population. There are some families and sectors of the populationclasses and ethnic groupswhich are outside the dominant consensus or are at least marginal to it. In societies which are relatively unintegrated ecologically, or which are integrated only by the sharing of a common and effective authority, so that centrally made decisions impinge only very intermittently and marginally on certain sectors of the societye.g., isolated villages which do not participate in a national economythe members of those sectors might be largely outside the structure of consensus, without being actively dissensual. But in modern societies, in which governments play such a large part in influencing allocations, and in which communications and transportation systems on a countrywide scale cause certain features of the central institutional system to enter more prominently into the field of attention of even the uneducated and apathetic, complete absence from the macrosocial structure of consensus and dissensus is very rare. There are bound to be in any large-scale society which is relatively integrated, both ecologically and authoritatively, individuals and groups who reject the pattern of beliefs which inform the dominant consensus as far-reachingly as is possible for human beings living in a society in which authority presses upon them, where they cannot entirely evade the pernieative influence of the central cultural system and where they cannot remain outside the ecological framework. Every large integrated society has a dissensual as well as a consensual culture. This dissensual culture is sustained by religious traditions, regional and class cultures, as well as by recurrently renewed ethical and metaphysical criticism of the prevailing system of authority and the allocations of which the incumbents of authoritative and elite roles are the beneficiaries. In modern societies, it is carried in, and elaborated by, certain sectors of the intellectual classes. This dissensual culture provides focus and form for those who experience pain from the existing distributions of income, power, and status. A society which inflicts the distress of a sense of exclusion and inferiority cannot wholly succeed in assimilating into its affirmative consensus those whom it wounds. The strength of the central institutional system and the deep penetration of the central cultural system result, nevertheless, in a considerable tenacity of the beliefs of which the consensus is constituted. The beliefs themselves, however, undergo gradual changes. Indeed, the traditional character of most of the beliefs renders such changes feasible, and this too helps to maintain the consensus. The ambiguity which is inherent in

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Consensus 179 population which are not intensely and actively involved in the civil conflict might still be quite consensual in their orientations toward each other, or, at least, much more so than the groups which are violently in conflict with each other. The disruption of society in situations of acute civil disorder consists in the fact that the violently dissensual elites are actively contending for the machinery and symbols of authority and the control of the system of distribution. The persistence of the more consensual sections of the population in the beliefs they have hitherto held, although less intensely preoccupied with the center of their society and therefore less influential in a time of crisis, fosters the reestablishment of a substantial measure of consensus when the crisis passes. Even the two warring parties usually contend against each other on behalf of divergent interpretations of a commonly shared constellation of beliefs. But the sense of affinity, of attachment to the whole society, which is an essential constituent of consensus, has been so violently ruptured that the approximate similarity of substantive beliefs retains no restraining power. Once civil order is restored, consensus gradually becomes reestablished. It will not be exactly the same consensual pattern of beliefs that existed previously. The newly established elite, legitimated by effective incumbency, will both deliberately and unwittingly infiltrate some of its own beliefs into the previously operative consensus; the members of the new elite will also themselves become assimilated into the consensual pattern which is held by those whom they rule and which they too previously shared at least to some extent. Consensus in Underdeveloped Countries Economically underdeveloped countries, because they lack a widely visible center, are also consensually underdeveloped. The structures of their belief patterns have not coalesced to the point where it is believed that central institutions are capable of acting justly in the allocations of rewards and opportunities. There is little sharing of belief in the legitimacy of such a center as is perceived. The image of the collective self in underdeveloped countries is predominantly primordialtribal, ethnic, or localor religious, and not civil. Because the members of each sector tend to believe that members of each other sector are incapable of acting except on behalf of their respective sectors, they do not believe that institutions staffed by such persons can be anything but disadvantageous. The dissensual state of underdeveloped countries illustrates the relationship between the sense of affinity and the element of belief in the structure of consensus. The perception of a bond to other persons constituted by their residence in the larger bounded territory is an essential component in the belief that such persons might act in a way

traditionally transmitted beliefsmost consensual beliefs are acquired through traditionfosters flexibility and permits continuity in the face of changing circumstances. Moderate changes in the shape and in the incumbents of the various positions in the distribution of power, income, and status can be borne without a serious diminution in adherence to the main beliefs in a prevailing consensus. If the losers in these allocative changes are not too drastically damaged, their participation in the consensus will not be greatly affected. Much depends on the continued strength of the central institutions. If these continue to maintain the appearance of effectiveness, dissensual tendencies will not become more powerful. Beliefs about "luck" which inhibit hostility toward the central institutional system, and a belief that distributions correspond to qualifications, render losses more bearable by causing them to appear just. When drastic changes do occur, then the consensus is likely *to be weakened by a deeper and more comprehensive withdrawal of those who are severely hurt by the changes. The diverse potentialities of interpretation, which every pattern of consensual beliefs contains, tend under these circumstances to be subjected to constructions which run in opposed directions, and reconciliation becomes more difficult It is also likely that large and rapid increments in the quantity of rewards received disrupt the participation of the gainers in the hitherto dominant consensus. Rapid and large increments tend to raise the level of aspiration to a point at which it will run beyond the limits permitted by the beliefs of the traditionally established consensus. Changes in technology disclose new possibilities of changing the share in valued objects possessed by various strata of the population. Those who perceive these possibilities, and who by virtue of their control over resources are in a position to enhance their share, will usually seek to do so. If they are prevented from doing so by the fixity of attachment of the incumbent elites to the existing distributions, and by the rigidity of the patterns of belief of those elites about the Tightness of the existing distributions, a new focus of dissensual beliefs will be formed. Technological innovations also engender new occupations with new occupational cultures. These new cultures might contain beliefs which cannot always or easily be accommodated within the existing structure of consensual beliefs, and this too leads to the creation of new dissensual "publics." Yet, despite the strains to which it is constantly subjected, the consensual structure of a society has much adaptability and considerable powers of endurance as well. Even in periods of acute civil disorder, when the previously legitimated authority has been expelled or has shown its weakness, the structure of consensual beliefs is not entirely dissolved. Society cannot ever dissolve into a Hobbesian state of nature. Even though it has ceased to bind the warring groups, the sections of the

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Consensus 181 of civil affinity and the powerful and pervasive center of society. If underdeveloped societies are to become civil societies, their centers must become more powerful and more pervasive. They must become more visible and more effective. They can become so through ecological integration, through the universality of educational participation and the establishment of competent civil services and a strong machinery of public order. The accidental and occasional emergence of a charismatic personality at the center might help in this process, but it cannot be counted on and it cannot be deliberately created. The emergence of an ideological movement might likewise contribute to the generation of consensus, but it too cannot be counted on. The secondary appurtenances of charismatic personalities and of ideological movements are fruitless, and they leave primordial attachments undiminished. The sound and fury of totalitarian regimes without their substance will likewise result only in the appearance of consensus without its reality. The consensus necessary for orderly development can come only from ecological integration, the growth of a commonly held body of culture and of visible and compelling central governmental institutions. It is only through these processes that underdeveloped societies can acquire a center and only this way that center and periphery can come closer together.

which is advantageous or at least not harmful to oneself or to those to whom one is primordially or religiously attached. There are several major factors which account for the nonexistence or faintness of the sense of civil affinity. The strength of primordial attachments, which is supported by the pervasive dominion of kinship in agricultural societies, inhibits civil propensities. These primordial attachments are in fact aroused to a state of active and combative distrust by the emergence of a common political arena. Whereas before the emergence of this common political arena, the primordial attachments were internally effective but externally they were only latent because their bearers did not act in a common arena. Political competition and conflict activate them. But the activation is not offset by an imposing, compelling central institutional system. Elections activate parochial attachments. The governments which rule between elections are not, however, pervasive enough in their organization, not effectively powerful enough in their actions to instill, in those whom they would rule, the belief in their legitimacy. Sheer power, even if felt in part to be legitimate, generates a belief in its legitimacy among those over whom it is exercised. A government which patently does not accomplish what it claims to accomplish, which cannot enforce its will and which is not continuously present, in action and symbolically, cannot generate the sense of civil affinity among those who live in the territory over which it is nominally sovereign. Governments which are effective, even when they are thought to be unjust, generate the awe and fear which are transformed in time into belief in legitimacy. Ineffective or feeble governments which are unjust according to prevailing standards of justice cannot generate this awe and fear, and so they cannot counteract latent and active primordial attachments. The widespread illiteracy of the adult populations of underdeveloped countries, the brevity and scantiness of participation in national educational systems, and the ecological disaggregatedness of the national territory render the center of society less visible than it needs to be to foster the sense of civil affinity. What is true of the mass of the population is also true of the elites which arise from that mass. The elites, particularly the political elites, because of their ineffectiveness, do not themselves believe in their own civil legitimacy. They too continue to live under the dominion of their primordial attachments. The sense of common nationality is probably better developed among the elites than it is in the mass of the population, but it is not strong enough to offset the primordiality which is exacerbated by the conflict of aspirations and the distrust aggravated by competition for scarce advantages. Advanced; large-scale modern societies generate and contain, of course, a great deal of dissensus. But in them the operation of dissensus is limited and confined by some measure of consensus rooted in a sense

Tradition 183 11 Tradition persistence through which ^the past lives into the present, or is even sometimes partially resurrected in the present. In the following paper I shall be concerned with mechanisms of persistence but not with all of them. Those mechanisms of persistence operating from the stability of genetic properties or from the stability of the ecological environment will be disregarded here. The Jarge residual category of persistences arising from attachments to past things, past persons, past societies, past practices, the performance of actions practised in the past, the adherence to modes of perception, belief, and appreciation received from those who observed them previously forms the subject matter of this paper. I am engaged here in an attempt to elucidate the structure, forms, and functions of tradition. "Tradition" and "traditional" are among the most commonly used terms in the whole vocabulary of the study of culture and'society. The terms "tradition" and "traditional" are used to describe and explain the recurrence, in approximately identical form, of structures of conduct and patterns of belief over several generations of membership or over a long time within single societieswith a more or less delimited territory and a genetically continuous populationand within corporate bodies as well as over regions extending over several bounded territorially discrete societies which are unified to the extent of sharing in some measure a common culturewhich means common traditions. Those who would explain why a particular action is performed or a particular belief accepted say that "there is a tradition" which motivates or elicits the desire to act or believe in that way; the matter is left at that "Traditional" is used to designate whole societies which change relatively slowly, or in which there is a widespread tendency to legitimate actions by reference to their having occurred in the past or in which the social structure is a function of the fact | that legitimations of authority tend to be traditional. Practically all current macrosociological classifications of types of whole societies rest in various ways on the distinction between the "traditional" and "nontraditional" or "modern." Critics of contemporary Western culture criticize it for having lost its traditions. Public disorder is attributed to the decay of tradition; the defects of institutions are interpreted as a result of the dissolution of traditions or their failure to develop traditions. Critics of societies outside the West criticize them for being too traditional. Those who exhort others in a group to act in a particular way allege that to do so would be in accordance with the traditions of the particular group; or alternatively that the adherence to certain traditions must be discontinued. Yet in scrutinizing the literature of the social and cultural sciences, one sees that there has been very little analysis of the properties of tradition. The substantive content of traditions has been much studied but not their^i traditionality. The modes and mechanisms of the traditional reproduction of beliefs are left unexamined. The traditionality of "traditional societies"

All existing things have a past. Nothing which happens escapes completely from the grip of the past; some events scarcely escape at all from its grip. Much of what exists is a persistence or reproduction of what existed earlier. Entities, events, or systems, physiological, psychological, social and cultural, have careers in which at each point the state of the system stands in some determinate relationship to the state of the system afrearlier points. Change as well as persistence is gripped by the past. The mechanisms of persistence in human things are numerous; they range from the stability imposed by genetic properties and the approximate identity of biological structure, from the continuity of personality through conditioned reflexes, biochemical equilibria, memory and self-identification in consequence of a constant ego ideal and moral standards to the large variety of modes of self-reproduction of social and cultural systems. All novelty is a modification of what has existed previously; it occurs and reproduces itself as novelty in a more persistent context Every novel characteristic is determined in part by what existed previously; Us previous character is one determinant of what it became when it became something new. The mechanisms of persistence are not utterly distinct from the mechanisms of change. There is persistence in change and around change, and the mechanisms of change also call forth the operation of the mechanism of persistence; without these, the innovation would fade and the previous condition would be restored. But the grip of the past is not exhaustively described when we speak of the determinative significance of the received institutional, personal, cultural equipment and the given environmental conditions and resources with which and in the face of which any action must be undertaken. Past things possess or acquire metaphysical, religious, and aesthetic significances for human beings. Memory makes possible but it does not compel preoccupation with the past, the love and hatred of the past which are more than the love and hatred of present things inherited from the past The needs to have a valued past, to be continuous with some aspect or strand of the past, to justify oneself by reference to a real or alleged connection with some vital point in the past are all problematic. They call for analysis in their own right and as parts of the system of mechanisms of

Previously published in a slightly different form in Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 13 (1971), pp. 122-59.

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Tradition 185 something which he has not previously been or done, and he will so do by acquiring beliefs which are already believed in his new environment or by performing actions which are already being performed in his new environment Those who are already there seem, more or less, to know what to do at each moment; they know what is expected of them and they know how to meet those expectations. They "believe" certain beliefs about their immediate situation,1 about the wider situation and about what is right and what is wrong in each of those situations. The newcomer has to "fit in." He is instructed by authorities; he sees what others are doing and infers beliefs from his perception of their actions about what is required. He hears what they say about what they are doing and what they believe. All these are "given" to him to "receive." He is, when he first enters the situation, a "recipient" of what is "given," of the already existent The situation is in very important respects the same for a child born into and growing up in a family. He too confronts a situation of ongoing activities and is the addressee of expectations, conformity with which will enable the "newcomer" to act in a manner which will give his activities an acceptable place in the future reproduction of the already ongoing activities. He becomes part of the bridge which carries the past into the present or, put somewhat differently, causes the present and prospectively the future to bear a close resemblance to the past. The beliefsincluding evaluations and imperativesand the models of action associated with these beliefs, which are offered to the newcomer by those already present and above all by those who are particularly charged with the responsibility to inculcate these beliefs into the newcomer, are already currently accepted and practiced by many of those who have preceded him in entry into the situation. The beliefs offered or available to him.are, as far as the newcomer is concerned, part of a situation which is "given" to him. They are continuations of a past which has preceded him. How far they extend into the past is another mattertheir "givenness" might or might not include reference to their "pastness" and its extent.2 The belief itself, referring to properties 1. In what follows, unless otherwise specified, I shall usually use the word "belief to refer to evaluative, appreciative, and cognitive judgements; it should be understood as covering procedural rules, cognitive, "factual" propositions regarding empirical and trans-empirical events, etc. I shall also deal with "traditional" actions but primarily with respect to the beliefs which engender "traditional" action. 2. We could use the term "tradition" to refer to every belief which is believed at a given moment by a particular person and which was believed and accepted previously by that person "because" he accepted (i. e.. believed) it even prior to that earlier point. What a person believes at any point in time is in a sense transmitted to him by himself. It would be an "intrapersonal" tradition. "Intrapersonal traditions" are closely connected with interpersonal traditions. The fact that a person believes at a given moment what he previously believed enhances the likelihood that he will continue to believe it in the future and that he will offer it to someone else in a way which will differfromthe way in which it would be offered if

is assumed, and the structures of these societies are described and studied without reference to the ways in which tradition determines them. It is not easy to account for this omission from contemporary studies of society and culture. One possibility is that, despite the frequency of its use, the term means nothing at all. Another is that it means so many different things which are so different that there is no point in trying to group them or to analyze them together. If social scientists and social philosophers took either of these positions, then that might explain why there has been no systematic treatment of the subject. But the fact that neither of these views is generally espoused among social scientists prompts me "to look for other explanations. This being so, I would put forward the following hypothesis: the social sciences have in the period of their recent prosperity been focused on the living; they have tended therefore to treat the "historical" aspect as a residual category from which ad hoc explanations are often drawn. The conceptual structure of social science theories tends on the whole to be atemporal. There is certainly a marked tendency for contemporary social sciences to see their subject matters in the here and now, in temporal sequences of short duration, the relations of two generations alive at the moment of study. It is not that the social sciences are indifferent to "communication" on the contrary, communication is among their chief interests. Nor do they disregard communication between generations. "Socialization"the process by which a newcomer, whether a newly born child in a family or an immigrant into a society or a new recruit into a corporate bodycertainly must refer to the assimilation through communication of a preexistent culture. Studies of socialization are valuable contributions to the understanding of the processes of transmission of beliefs {and evaluative attitudes) from those who have held them to those who have not hitherto held them but they are seldom linked with "tradition." Studies of change in beliefs are accounts of changes within an individual lifetimeusually the period scrutinized is much shorter than a lifetimeor of a series of cross sections of the states of belief of a population at various points in a temporal sequence. In the latter, the mechanisms which connect the various cross sections or states of belief at a series of points in time, are not treated. Yet it is the linking mechanism and the sequential temporal pattern which are among the constitutive properties of tradition. The Presentness of the Past A person who arrives in a situation which is new to hima person taking up employment in an organization in which he has not been ^previously employed, a student entering a university which he has not attended previously, a recruit into an army unit, or an immigrant into an alien societycomes into an ongoing situation. He must become or do

^w^ 186 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus /' Tradition 187

of the situation and the role of the newcomer, might not in principle include any reference to the grounds for its acceptabilityalthough in fact it usually does. Is every belief which is given, i.e., preexistent and not newly created by the person who believes in it, a traditional belief? Rather than to attempt to answer this question directly, I shall follow a more roundabout path. f Traditions are beliefs with a particular social structure; they are a / consensus through time. In their content they might well be atemporal, [^,'i.e. they might make no reference to past or future, and they might not even have a temporal (traditional) legitimation. But even then, they have a temporal structure. They are beliefs with a sequential social structure. They are beliefs which are believed by a succession of persons who might have been in interaction with each other in succession or at least in a unilateraleven if not intergenerationally continuouschain of communication. This structural property of traditional belief is distinct from the substantive properties of the beliefs, i.e. the extent to which the beliefs themselves refer to the past and to which their legitimation refers to the past. It is also-distinct from modes of acceptance. The sequential structure of traditional beliefs and actions can itself become a symbolized component of the belief and its legitimation or the grounds of its acceptance. It becomes part by being referred to in its pastness as a model"We should do as we have done before"or by becoming part of the legitimation"We should do now what we did previously because that is the way in which it has always been done or because that is the way in which the founder did it." Although analytically the temporal structure of traditional belief or action is independent of its being taken into the substance of the belief, in reality complete independence is unlikely. If the temporal structure is not a product of biological identity, then the reproduction of the past belief or performance is likely to occur when the past belief or performance serves as a model for the prospectively accepted belief or prospectively performed action. The past performance or the action or the past acceptance of the belief is less likely to be a model if there is not some reference to its pastness, i.e. to the previousness of its occurrence. Thus even though oneperhaps the chiefconstitutive feature of a traditional belief is that it has been believed previously, of a traditional action that it has been performed previously, its present acceptance, or performanceits continuation in the presentdepends upon its being perceived by those who recommend acceptance or perform it as having been existent previously. ,

he had not believed it at an earlier time. In this paper I am interested primarily in interpersonal and above all intergenerational traditions, but I do not gainsay the significance of the intrapersonal traditions for the interpersonal.

Hence a "statistical" criterion of recurrence alone, even if we could obtain a satisfactory measure of the critical minimum frequency of recurrence necessary for the constitution of a tradition, is not sufficient. Frequency of recurrence is a constitutive element but it is not sufficient to define a traditional belief (or action). Acceptance or performance in the past must have some causal or necessary connection with its acceptance or performance in the present, and since the occurrence in the present is not a function of biological structure or genetic endowment, it must be mediated through the perception of pastness. There are beliefs which might be believed recurrently, generation after generation, because they are rediscovered in the confrontation of experiences which are themselves stable and recurrent, generation after generation. The elementary rules of arithmetic, for example, could conceivably be rediscovered by every generation out of the need for classifying and enumerating to solve the tasks of everyday life; we might justifiably refuse to view the belief in rules excogitated and promulgated anew in each generation of users as a traditional belief. Likewise, the religious needs of the human race might generate perceptual experiences in every generation which would create a recurrent "knowledge of God" similar from generation to generation. Recurrence or identity through time is not, as such, the decisive criterion of traditional belief or action. It is not the intertemporal identity of beliefs or actions which constitutes a tradition; it is the intertemporal filiation of beliefs which is constitutive. / Filiation entails transmission, "handing down." Actions are not handed down, only their models, rules and legitimations are. Filiation entails not only handing down but receiving as well. Both handing down or recommending and receiving are susceptible to various motives. There is, however, a marked tendency for reception to be motivated by belief in the legitimacy of the authority of the recommender and for some of this legitimacy to be connected with the traditionality of the authority and of the rule which he sponsors or commands. There is something about the mode of the handing down of traditional beliefs and of receiving what is handed down which distinguishes traditional beliefs from other beliefs. We often speak of the traditional acceptance of a belief as an unthinking acceptance of a belief previously accepted by others. The unthinkingness of the acceptance might be tantamount to the acceptance of the model of the already existent as a whole. Alternatively the model might be accepted after scrutiny to determine whether it conforms with certain criteria which are themselves unthinkingly accepted. Or again, it might entail the discovery of a new pattern of belief by the application of criteria which are unthinkingly accepted. In any case, a fully traditional belief is one which is accepted without being assessed by any criterion / other than its having been believed before. The unthinking or "unconscious" acceptance of beliefs which in their substance are rationally and empirically demonstrable as true is a real

188 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus possibility. Scientific and technological beliefs are often "unthinkingly*' accepted; that is, they are accepted without analysis by the acceptor of the grounds on which they could be demonstrated. Such beliefs are clearly traditional in their formal properties, even if they are not substantively traditional. Beliefs which are rationally recommended and received and which are not in that sense traditional do enter into and form traditions. Their traditionally is less homogeneous or pervasive than that of beliefs which are substantively traditional. Their traditionality may obtain with respect to the criteria for the determination of what is to be believed, with respect to the legitimacy of those who conduct the institutions within which the beliefs are promulgated, but there is a zone in the beliefs themselves which is in itself free of traditionality. It is a rationaland empirical zone. The intricate interconnections between rational, empirical, and "traditional" traditions constitute a major problem in the study of tradition. Beliefs can also be accepted on the grounds of the charismatic qualities of their recommendersjust as they might be generated by the working of the mind on the raw facts of experience or by the rationally persuasive powers of those who recommend them. Traditional reception is different from a belief received solely on the grounds that its "recommender" appears to the "recipient" to be so intensely, and concentrated ly charismatic that possession of the belief and its observance in conduct place the recipient into direct contact with the locus of charisma. A belief which refers to sacred things can be structurally traditional; it can be in part rational as well as charismatic. Beliefs about sacred things can be transmitted and accepted "unthinkingly." Thus it would appear that there is nothing in the content of a belief about charismatic things which requires it to be factually independent of tradition. On the contrary, such beliefs about charismatic things are most often transmitted traditionally; they are recommended largely and are accepted largely on traditional grounds, that is, because they have been accepted in the past. In many cases the charismatic content itself is tied to pastness; the charismatic events occurred in the past and adherence to propositions about them involves also adherence to a pattern evolved in the past and that partly on grounds of their having occurred in the past In principle, a belief recommended by a concentrated ly and intensely charismatic individual has no past. Its authority depends on its immediately present contact with the source of its authority or validity. Its persuasiveness rests on the immediacy of the link to the source of charisma which reception provides. This was what Max Weber meant when he spoke of charisma as being revolutionary and antitraditional. Yet in the course of the process of "routinization," which means transmission to a succeeding generation, charisma becomes "tradition-' r

Tradition 189 alized." "Pastness" becomes important as the link to the charismatic source, which becomes increasingly remote temporally. Its "pastness" is then joined to its charisma as the grounds for the claims which are made for its acceptance and observance. The Present as the Reinforcement of Responsiveness to the Past The property of statistical frequencysheer massive factuality, present and pasthas a penetrating impact on the behavior of those who perceive it. This is true both of contemporaneous events and events occurring in extended temporal Filiations. The simple perception, or rather entry through imagination, into a massive performance touches something deep in the human mind. The communis opinio does not work only because its consensual acceptance by "everyone" reduces the probability of perceiving or imagining the empirically possible alternatives which could be perceived by an external observer. It works because it entails a perception of the quality resident in other minds, and this perception opens the mind to a "contagious" effect. It overcomes the tendencies of individuality which would make the individual self-sufficient and separate and which fuses individual minds into something closer to a single entity. Through the sharing of an idea, it suspends the sense of separate existences. The perception of a certain "state of mind" in others arouses a disposition toward' a similar "state of mind" in the perceiverwhere the perceived "state of mind" is of sufficiently massive frequency. The anonymous "they," "everybody," etc., are authoritative even where they utter no command, give no directives, and indeed do not in any way address themselves to the potential believer, who only perceives their acceptance of the given belief and is not perceived by them. There is something like this at work in the traditional reception of a belief. In traditional transmission and reception, the communis opinio embraces the past as well as the present; it is the acceptance of a belief which has been accepted by others in the past and by living elders who speak for the past in the present Those who have a quality of pastness about them "count," as do those who are alive and present. There is a marginal case of traditional transmission when living elders recommend a belief or a practiceexplicitly or by providing a model and it is difficult to say just how much of the authority of the proffered model derives from the pastness which the elders represent Where the elders offer traditional legitimation ("It has always been done that way among us," or "Our forefathers always believed this to be true"), then it is clearly traditional; but they need not offer such legitimation, and the simple fact that they are older than those to whom they proffer the model makes them representative of an ill-defined pastness. The "pastness" imputed to a belief or action may derive either from its

F"190 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus Tradition 191 Obviously a great charismatic exemplar counts for more than a fairly considerable number of anonymous performers or believers; it is not frequency alone nor is it even pastness alone since the traditions which are respected in one society or lineage or corporate body often carry no weight with those who are members of other societies, lineages, or corporate bodies. A particular relationship to the individual or collective performers or believers in the past is called for. Some belief in affinity be it primordial or civil or charismatic or idealis a necessary condition of the willingness to receive a tradition, to accept it as a mandatory model for one's own conduct and the judgment of others. Still we must not be diverted by the necessary task of analyzing the relationship between different types of sense, of affinity and the reception of tradition from considering pastness as such. Does the fact that an action has been performed or a belief believed in the past confer on it a significance different from its mere occurrence in the present? In one,respect, it is not as exigent in its demand for attention as an action performed in the present Its past performers or believers, if they are no longer living, are not capable of doing damage, in any empirically plausible way, to the persons who will not heed their "lessons," whereas living and present contemporaries, if their actions and the norms which the actions imply are disregarded, might make unpleasant the lives of those who are indifferent to them. It might also, not wholly unreasonably, be contended that given the facts of memory and discriminating evaluation, a large part of the things which human beings at any one time value is bound to be in the past. Important though the present is, it cannot contain everything. Then too, given the deficiencies of imaginative powers of most human beings, the need to act effectively requires models of action and people will therefore readily accept the models which have been generated in the past and which have the advantage of being easily available. Yet there is undoubtedly more to it than this. "Pastness" as such seems to gather to itself an authority independent of the contemporary consensus, which confronts the individual actor and recommends to him a belief or action affected with pastness. The existence of some measure of present consensus in the recommendation of a traditionally received or legitimated belief is in fact evidence of this independence. But why are older things thought to be better? Why does the mere fact of having existed earlier in the history of the earth or of the species or of one's own culture or society have particular significance? Does a traditional reception of belief embrace in an inarticulate form some elementary image of a connection with the beginning of the universe, the origin of time, the point at which mankind was more in contact with the sacred source which set it into motion and provides the scheme for its right ordering? The greater power of those who are older to indulge and deprive is probably one important source of the prestige of the past A very large

presumed connection with symbols of authority in the pastthe symbols may be symbols of particular persons who exercised authority in the past or of events in which authority was significantly exercisedor from the mere fact of its frequent anonymous occurrence in the past The sheer, massive, and anonymous occurrence of the phenomenon in the past can constitute its claim to authoritativeness as much as acceptance or performance by a great personality in the past. In some respects, the mechanisms which operate in the generation of consensus among contemporaries are also operative in traditional reception. The need for the transcendence of the boundaries of the empirical self, in order to share beliefs in a community of those who have similar "states of mind," extends not only laterally toward contemporaries but also backward toward those who lived in past times. There is also a need to be in contact with themnot with all who have ever lived but selectively. The need for continuity with those present, is a variant of the need to be part of an order which is infused with meaning. Much of the reception of beliefs inherited from the past'is to be attributed simply to the massive fact of their presence, to their widespreadT acceptance by other persons to an extent which hampers the imaginative generation of plausible alternative beliefs. In any given particular situation in which long-recurrent beliefs are widely accepted, this kind of reception, which we shall call "consensual reception," -is probably a major factor in the acceptance of beliefs and norms which have been observed in previous generations and which are recommended traditionally by the elders to their juniors. In other words, this kind of reception reinforces reception on the basis of "pastness." The two bases of reception are almost always concomitant; the combination varies from a very high degree of "pastness" and a small degree of "consensuality" to their opposite. Part of the acceptance by common opinion may be a function of (a) the presence of persons in dominant roles who are especially sensitive to pastness and (b) an incipient readiness to respond to the pastness of things, beliefs, and events which are recommended both authoritatively and consensually.

The Past as an Object of Attachment The effectiveness of frequency of belief or action in the present is a function, at least in some part, of visibility. But this is not so with respect to events of the past. Their adherents or performers are no longer present Even though it is said by the living that the events in question were very frequent in the past, there will remain the question why the pastness has any significance. Granted that human beings have memories and that historiography, mythological or truthful, extends and fortifies memory beyond the beginnings of the living generation, why should the past be significant?

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Tradition 193 insistent search or demand for a tradition which is not immediately received and consensually recommended is not a search for just any traditional belief or practice. The search for past practices and beliefs to replace those which are current at the moment sometimes discovers once accepted beliefs of the seeker's own society. Sometimes the search goes "abroad" and finds once or still accepted beliefs and practices which are thought to be more valid than the current beliefs and practices which might also be to a large extent traditional. The sought-for tradition is sometimes said to be the "real" tradition or the genuine source of contemporary "dilapidated" traditions, which have broken the lines of effective traditional transmission with the point of origin. "Renaissances" are the characteristic form of this rehabilitated tradition. The whole phenomenon bears a close relationship to presumed "Golden Ages." It should be added that the source or model of the recreated tradition need never have existed in the form in which the seeker alleges; what is significant is that he believes that it did so exist. The Formal Properties of Traditional Beliefs Traditional beliefs are any beliefs which are part of a tradition of belief, i.e. of a sequential chain of beliefs with which they possess an identity or close resemblance; the identity or close resemblance are functions of reception of the beliefs from their earlier state in the sequential pattern. Not all beliefs which are traditional in the sense that they are part of a traditiona persisting intertemporal patternare equally traditional in their mode of transmission, although most transmission of most beliefs of most members of a society is traditional in the sense that the beliefs are received as "given"at least at the moment of their first reception. Some reception can be based on reasoned argument regarding the merits and consequences of the belief, empirical evidence, etc. But even these beliefs, which are accepted by some persons because they are susceptible of "proof' by reason and evidence, are "unthinkingly" accepted by many others simply as "given," vouched for by the authoritativeness of their prior existence and the authority of those who recommend them. Thus every and any belief can be a traditional belief. The content of a belief, however scientific that belief, does not render it immune to becoming part of a tradition and of being transmitted traditionally. The beliefs which become traditionalized need contain no substantive reference to the past; they need not express appreciation of, the past in order to be recommended and accepted for their connection with the past. They can indeed disparage the past and praise the present and the future. They can claim to legitimate their actions by reference to law in conformity with present popular will. There is probably no belief and no

component of the face-to-face and the more indirect interaction in any society occurs between older and younger persons with much of the influence flowing from the older to the younger. It is not exclusively because the older ones occupy positions of power in corporate bodies and dispose over resources and rewards that they exercise influence on the younger members. The persuasiveness of the elders for many of those who acknowledge their authority is enhanced by the fact that the elders knew what the institution was before the young ones came into it. The asymmetrical interaction permits the younger ones, to some extent, to share in these past states of mind which are embodied and symbolized by their elders. Thus, even where "pastness" is not explicitly invoked as a ground for the reception of a belief, the recipient is responsive to the proffered belief on the grounds of its pastness. Consensual reception is in large part traditional reception, even where no reference is made to the "pastness" of the belief proposed and accepted, and quite apart from the formal and substantive properties of the belief itself. There is no direct linear relationship between influence and age. The more "juventocentric" a society, the earlier the beginning of the downward curve of the influence of advancing age. Even in such societies, however, elders continue to have preponderance of influence for a substantial period; and this influence is enhanced by the correlation between the allocation of power and age which even the most "juventocentric" societies have not succeeded in overcoming. As long as there are "careers," those who enter earlier will have advantages not simultaneously available to those who have entered later. Only if "experience" ceases to be equated with the number of years of service, or if experience comes to be excluded as a criterion of recruitment and is replaced by other criteria which are not correlated with age, will later entrants stand on a more equal footing with the earlier entrants. This might diminish the amount of "traditional belief in a society in relation to the total body of beliefs in that society but it cannot eliminate it. Traditional beliefs and practices are not only recommended by those who have received and observed them from their own "elders" and received and observed those immediately "junior" to whom they are recommended. It is, in other words, not just a matter of passive reception of the given. There is a more active, seeking relationship to traditional belief which motivates recommendation and reception at least in part and which also appears in a more independent form. Traditions are sometimes sought for. The need to be connected with the past, which is present in varying degrees in recommendation and reception, is sometimes intense among those to whom the recommended, immediately given traditional beliefs are unsatisfactorywho are in search of traditional beliefs to which to attach themselves, to "create a past" for themselves which will legitimate them in a way which just being themselves in the present will not allow them to do. This active and

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Tradition 195 A tradition can have a continuous or a discontinuous structure. Beliefs which have died away and have apparently ceased to have a wide adherence are capable of renewal, of finding once more a widespread acceptance ("renaissances"). For example, the belief in the value of civic virtue according to the image of the Roman republic can lose its following through being transformed into a belief in the value of the contemplative lifeas seems to have happened in Europe in the high Middle Ages. It can then be revived as it was in fact in the late Middle Ages and early modern times in Italy and in eighteenth-century France and North America and to some extent England. The models which are deferred to are not those which are immediately antecedent. Likewise the prophetic tradition can be revived intermittently and indeed begin to flourish once more as it did in England in the seventeenth century amongst the dissenting sects or as it did in the Great Revival in the United States in the nineteenth century. Different structures of traditional transmision will hypothetically each produce a corresponding set of characteristic formal properties. Hypotheses about such correlations will be more appropriately produced when better classifications of modes of traditional transmission and of the formal properties of beliefs have been established. All I do here is to indicate the problem.

action which is not capable of being taken as "given." This does not mean that beliefs and the norms of action which become "given" do not by the fact of their "givenness," by the fact of their traditional transmission, acquire certain determinate properties. Nor does the fact that any substantive belief or norm of action is capable of becoming traditionalized mean that all beliefs and norms are equally likely to become traditionalized, or that they become traditionalized in the same way. Whatever the substantive content of the beliefs, there are certain properties which tend to be generated in.them in consequence of their traditionality, i.e. in consequence of their being available or "given" rather than by being newly promulgated by reason, experiment, or revelation. The length of the chain of traditionality and the mode of transmission are further determinants of the properties which substantive beliefs acquire. For example, oral transmission as over against written transmission, transmission in the context of unspecialized institutions rather than through specialized institutions, reception in the context of concentrated and disciplined preparatory study rather than in the context of ongoing performance, transmission through exemplary models rather than through exposition and command, all have some influence on the formal properties of the beliefs acquired through traditional transmission. Some of the formal properties of beliefs and patterns of belief are precision or vagueness; particularity or generality; mandatoriness or permissiveness; flexibility or rigidity; coherence or disjunctiveness. Transmission which refers to written texts of belief is conducive to precision. Yet even written transmission cannot be exhaustive in its prescriptions; this leaves room for interpretation and precision introduces some measure of modification. Traditional transmission of written beliefs tends toward modification in the direction of greater particularity as well as precision (e.g. casuistry and "normal science"). Oral, exemplary transmission seems to be more permissive than exposition from a written text The longer the presumed chain of traditionality, the greater the degree of mandatoriness. Flexibility is the extent of modification or the capacity for modification of a belief or a pattern of belief through time. The levels of modificationfor example, details or frameworkcan change at different rates. The degree and level of modification might be affected by the mode of transmission; thus learning in the context of performance might permit greater and more continuous modification of a pattern of belief than learning by disciplined study. Oral transmission might permit more modification through an extended period of time than transmission on the basis of a given written text. The latter will permit modification of details through specification; the former might permit more gradual modification of the framework of a pattern of belief through, gradual modification of details.

The Substantive Properties of Traditional Beliefs In addition to the structural character of traditions and the formal properties of traditionally transmitted beliefs, we must consider the properties of substantively traditional beliefs. Although all beliefs can be traditional (in structure and in mode of transmission), there are some which are traditional in substance. These substantively traditional beliefs are more likely than others to possess the structural properties and the modes of transmission and legitimation which I call traditional. Beliefs which are not substantively traditional, although they too are capable of possessing traditional structure and transmission, are less likely to do so than are those which are substantively traditional. What are the properties of substantively traditional beliefs? Traditionality of legitimation is one of these. The legitimation of a traditional beliefwhich is not the same as the substance of a belief and which is more integral to the mode of transmissionrecommends its acceptance and observance on the grounds that it has been accepted as valid in the past,or that a "great man" created or discovered it in the past or had it revealed to him in the past. Not all legitimations of traditionally transmitted beliefs give central prominence to their past existence, acceptance, observance, or origin. Rational and charismatic legitimation are likewise possible. In their most elementary form, traditionally transmitted beliefs are recommended and received "unthinkingly"; they are "there." No alter-

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Tradition 197

natives are conceived; there is nothing to do but to accept them. Once they reach the point of requiring a legitimation, the reference to the "pastness" of their origin, promulgation, reception, and observance becomes more frequent Scientific, religious, political, ethical beliefs which do not refer to the past and which support themselves empirically, rationally, expedientially, and intuitively or by revelation, and which are in no way substantively traditional, tend in consequence of their structural traditionality to be supplementary legitimated by reference to their past creation, adherence, and observance. They could conceivably be entirely legitimated by the invocation of the "tradition" of which they are a part, that is, by reference to their pastness, but in that case they would cease to be what we know them to have been. Once living bodies of knowledge could continue to exist as dead subjects, not examined, not criticized and simply perpetuated. It is likely that certain branches of knowledge occasionally and transiently fall into this condition. Yet is all this distinct from the question of whether these are substantively traditional beliefsbeliefs which are not just legitimated by the claim that many others or a great many others believed them before, or which do not just stand in some genetic affinity with similar beliefs which existed previously and from which in a sense they flow? Are there beliefs which we can call traditional beliefs? It is perfectly obvious that there are. Traditional beliefs are beliefs which contain an attachment to the past, to some particular time in the past or to a whole social system or to particular institutions which (allegedly) existed in the past. Beliefs which assert the moral Tightness or superiority of institutions or a society of the past and which assert that what is done now or in the future should be modeled on the past patterns of belief or conduct are traditional beliefs. Beliefs which assert that an earlier age of one's own society or civilization was a "golden age" or "the good old times" are substantively traditional beliefs. In principle, all of these beliefs about the superiority of the past to the present, and about the need to conform in the present with the standards embodied in the past could be about any type of society or institution or belief as long as it is located in the past. It could be about an equalitarian regime, about a republic, about a regime of individualismand so it in fact was in the Roman Empire, when historians like Tacitus looked back to the regime of republican virtue and used it as a standard to disparage the period in which they themselves lived. So it was in the United States in certain sectors of opinion when the ethics of self-help and laissez-faire individualism were looked back upon as a golden age. Regardless of its substantive content, any age or society has the capacity to arouse the affections of its successors, near or remote, and to provide them with a criterion for judging their own contemporaries and the society in which they live. The attachment to the past might have very narrow and

particular foci such as the literary production or the books produced in a certain past period or the furniture, painting, silverware, domestic ornamentation, or dress. There is certainly a marked element of traditionality in all thisit is an attachment to what has been handed downbut it is desirable to distinguish the aesthetic appreciation and particularly the aesthetic appreciation of certain artifacts of the past from the handing down and reception of the cognitive and moral beliefs which enter constitutively into social structure. These considerations now lead us to the positive content of traditional beliefs. These have often been described by sociologists and anthropologists; they are the beliefs of the Gemeinschaft, of the folk or peasant societies. They are beliefs in the virtue of authority, of respect for age and the rightful allocation of the highest authority to the aged. They are beliefs in the value of the lineage and the kinship group and in the primacy of obligations set by membership in these groups. Traditional beliefs are deferential. They express an attitude of piety not only toward earthly authorities, toward the elders and ancestors, but also to the invisible powers which control earthly life. Holy men and priests are prized by traditional attitudes, as is sacred learning, the learning of sacred texts. The traditional attitude is a god-fearing attitude. Traditional beliefs enjoin ceremonial and ritual performances. Traditional beliefs are particularistic in the sense that they recommend the primacy of obligations and attachments to bounded collectivitiesabove all to the primordial collectivities of lineage, tribe, locality, ethnicity, and to the cultural sublimations of primordial ties in linguistic communities and national societies. Closely connected with this is the frequent disposition in traditional belief to perceive a sharp disjunction between one's own collectivity and others and therefore to accept the appropriateness of war as a normal relationship between societies. Traditional beliefs of the substantive sort have no place for rational scientific theory or the results of scientific research. They are expressed in empirical.technology rather than rational-scientific technology. The use of techniques of the control and transformation of nature tends to be stereotypical. Magic supplements empirical technique as a means of coping with the vicissitudes of earthly existence. This short list of the substantive properties of traditional beliefs could be extended, but this is not necessary at this point The Sacredness of the Past There are numerous grounds for the reception of the beliefs which are given. Their sheer existence makes a model available to an actor who must find a way to act, to do what he has to do. Unimaginative acceptance of the given is joined by fear of authority, the desire to be consensual and a desire to be somehow connected with the past. One

198 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus / fundamental ground for traditional reception norm is awe before the sacred in the past By the sacred, here I mean those events and "power" to which ultimate importance is attributed. Sacred beliefs are beliefs about the things which are thought to be most vital and most basic to existence. Sacredness can be a property of individuals or of collectivities or of the external physical, nonhuman world; what is important is that these properties embody and represent symbolically or are connected with symbols which are essential in our image of life and the universe and their right order. The sacredness of things can be timeless, continuously operative; it can be so while still having a temporal component, in which the past or the future has a special significance. Authority possesses the quality of sacredness, and authority is exercised by elders, by parents, teachers, adults, through whom "the past" is transmitted and by whom attachments to the past are fostered. Not all authority is traditional authority, but most authority has a traditional element in the structural, legitimatory, and substantive senses. Its institutions have usually-been received as given; part of the legitimation is traditional, and its norms and rules often have considerable traditional content in the sense of being aimed at maintaining what has been received. There is an authority inhering in symbols which derive their weight and force through their connection with persons formerly existent, who once filled certain roles or were members of the collectivity at an earlier stage in one's history. They may be "founding fathers" whose importance has become detached from their names. They may be ancestors without names who have even in the course of time become completely disembodied and are now simply "the past." They may become sublimated into maxims and phrases, like "That is the way it has always been done," "That is the way they used to do it," "That is the way we have always done i t " How does "pastness" become infused with sacredness? Why does the past sometimes arouse the tremendum numinosum which is aroused by the contemplation of the holy"! It probably has to do with origins, with decisive events, with "great moments" which shaped what came later. It has some primordial qualities which are associated with birth, marriage, and death, and it finds expression in our confrontation with the past Just as there are marked differences in sensitivity to the sacred in general, so there are marked differences in sensitivity to the sacred in the past. Some persons are "musical"; others are not. In any population, there will be a small minority whose responsiveness to the past is great. Such people have a continuous and alert sensitivity to the claims of the past for a continued existence in the present Some of them are bores who only speak about the past, implying a criticism of the present and a refuge from it; others, more interested in the present, wish to protect it from becoming too different from the past Still others seldom speak of it

Tradition 199 but are quietly attached to it and are shaken by departures from the model which it offers. They are saddened by the demolition of an old building, which has survived from the past in material form, by changes in the vocabulary and in the patterns of action which are believed to have a long past and which excite their affection. There are some persons who think that the past had more wisdom than the present and that what has come down to us is sounder, righter, and more imperative than what has been thought and devised more recently. For them, the wisdom of the race is contained by what is handed down. In most persons, however, the sense of the past is very rudimentary. Their sensibilities are muffled, becoming acute to the claims of the past from time to time, but not regularly. But even in this muffled state, between moments of acuity, the responsiveness to the past exists in an attenuated form. Such persons have little imagination for "how things were in the past" When they confront an object existing at present before them, if they see anything in it, they see rather its potentialities for future development or as something which affects them at the moment or in the near future. The connection of such objects with the past means little or nothing to them, most of the time. Yet these persons too live largely in the grip of the past Much of their environment and most of their beliefs are "given," and even though they care little about its pastness, they live from it and in its midst They do not perceive or appreciate the "pastness" of the beliefs they accept. This continuing acceptance is partly the function of present authority, which is usually more sensitive to pastness than are those who accept their authority. Their latent sensitivity to the past must be aroused by other persons who must "believe" in it more than they do. Those who are "unmusical" in their response to pastness can be just as much in its grip as those who are not They might have no reverence for the past and its products, but their actions are little different from those who do have such reverence, because they accept the latter's authority. The mass of mankind, the majority of the population of most societies, are the recipients of tradition as a result of tradition-recommending initiative of some of their contemporaries, and above all the authorities of their society. The latter are more sensitive to the "sacredness" of "pastness," and by their example and their recommendation they arouse the latent responses of their less "dutiful" fellow countrymen. The immediate pressure of "givenness" is probably as important as the sacredness of the past, perhaps more so in most societies. This is especially true in what are called "traditional" societies, which are relatively homogenous, which offer few visibly practicable alternative lines of action, and which, moreover, by their very homogeneity of response to particular situations do not stimulate the imagination regarding the possibility of inventing new lines of action. This is also, however, to some extent true for large-scale, pluralistic societies, where

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Tradition 201 belief, which is thought to have been "allowed" to deteriorate or to be lost and forgotten. This "rediscovered" tradition is the vehicle of a better order which had its "great moment," a more genuine existence, in the past. The Refusal of Traditional Beliefs Objects and symbols thought to be sacred arouse hostility as well as awe; traditions in which the sacred is imbedded also arouse hostility. "Pastness" not only arouses awe and observance, it also compels a tendency toward disrespect. Authority frequently engenders some disposition toward rebellion. The more pronounced the element of sacredness in authority, the more likely it is also to arouse disrespect or, if not disrespect, secret inward fuming and dissatisfaction in certain types of persons. Among those persons who are especially sensitive to elements of sacredness and "pastness" connected externally or substantively with beliefs, there are some who are negatively sensitive. These are the "atheists," in contrast to the "agnostic" and "indifferent." Their rejection of traditionally transmitted beliefs out of the hatred of authority and the hatred of "pastness" is not to be regarded as identical with the rejection which is a function of individuality. Indeed, the more compulsively animated the rejection of the traditional things, the less it has to do with individuality. A compulsive rejection of traditional norms because of their pastness is no more than a form of antinomianism. The antinomian rejection of tradition is not impelled by the drive for individuality; it is more likely to be impelled by the need for a more comprehensive and absorbing transcendence in which individuality has been completely renounced. Traditionally transmitted beliefs can also be rejected by those who, having been exposed to them, fear their own inability to live up to them. This in the first instance is not a denial of the validity of the traditionally transmitted belief; it is, in fact, often acknowledgment of its validity, but weakness and apprehension of failure fosters deafness to its recommendation. There are many other motives and conditions for the rejection of recommended traditions. The remoteness of the recommending authoritythe lack of affinity between the authority and the subject to whom the recommendation is addressedbased on disparities and disjunctions of culture and on ecological disjunctions is certainly very common. These rejections however occur in situations in which the beliefs recommended have not been previously accepted. Much more frequent are the rejections which derive from the unfittingness of the traditional belief to newly acquired beliefs and practices. New situations which create new problems and which offer new gratifications and possibilities of gratification render previously accepted beliefs

alternative responses are visible to those who can see them. Yet even in these societies, for most persons at most points in their childhood and maturity, belief and courses of action which are within any particular social circle, are "given." Incongruent alternatives are not so much deliberately rejected as scarcely perceived. Nonetheless, even in the reception of what is "given" there are some rudimentary feelings for "pastness." Awe before authority is.a form of self-transcending effort to enter into contact with other minds possessing sacred properties. These other mindsexcept in the case of personal attachments, such as personal affection or love-^are not just the minds of those who are known in interaction. They are part of a larger, more embracing realm of being, which transcends the present and which in many cases has had its "great moment" in the past. Thus far we have spoken of the reception of what is traditionally transmitted as a function of sheer "givenness" and of a response to the pastness of the "given." But there are persons who are not passive recipients of the given and who are more selective. They find'particular bits of the past with which they wish to be connected. They find these bits available to them in the "cultural heritage," but there is no authority who recommends them in an imperative way. Of course, within the circle of those who share that "tradition" there are authorities who do recommend them imperatively, but membership in such circles of tradition is not imperative. These tradition-seeking persons exhibit a combination of resistance to currently prevailing and authoritatively recommended beliefs and an intense and active sensitivity to elements of the sacred contained in monuments or documents or texts which have come down from the past Beliefs which are current in autochthonous and primordial groups are not for these persons, although the beliefs which they "appropriate" to themselves may substantively refer to autochthonous or primordial things. Tradition-searching has a marked tendency toward being ideological. Tradition-seekers seek a "more genuine,*' more immediate link with the sacred, but they do it through the mediation of a past event. The continuing transmission of beliefs rests on the need for order, not merely as a stable context fir instrumental action but as a transcendent realm of being, centered on the sacred. For many persons, what is traditionally transmitted through the recommendation of existing authority meets this need. But such authority does not always do so, and the order which is offered by the recommended beliefs is unsatisfactory. The immediately inherited pattern of belief is then broken. It may be broken by direct entry into immediate contact with the sacred in mysticism which also has its traditional beliefs and techniquesor by the use of reason and experiment in science. In the instance we have been discussing, it is broken by recourse to a better version of traditional

202 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus implausible and disadvantageous. The beliefs might not under those circumstances be explicitly renounced, but their acceptance becomes more attenuated, more intermittent, and more blurred. They gradually turn into new beliefs which still retain some of the idiom of the old beliefs and a little of their content. Where the hitherto prevailing authorities have failed to exercise their authority in an effective manner and where expectations are not gratified, the hitherto established and received traditional beliefs cease to be "fitting." Where ecological and technological changes render possible or irresistible changes in modes of work and structures of kinship, many traditional beliefs become "unfitting" and either become attenuated or are transformed. The authorities who recommended the traditional beliefs lose their deference position, and those traditional beliefs with which they are associated, quite apart from those which have become "unfitting," also lose their capacity to elicit acceptance. Alongside of these motives for rejecting what is presented under the auspices of the past are the counterattractions of the present and the future. The need to be in contact with contemporaries and what is "up to date" in them bespeaks a temporal sensibility. Just as in some situations it is thought that the past was the repository of what is good and true, so in otherswhich I cannot specifyit is thought that the present and the incipient future are the loci of the good and the true. This belief is often expressed in a fear of "being left behind," of being "old-fashioned," "behind the times," "out of date," etc. Individuality, Creativity, and the Reception of Tradition The chain of the transmission of traditional norms may be broken by the search for a better order in the past or by the compulsive need to desecrate and destroy an authority which dominates from the very center of existence. It may be broken by a belief, in its inappropriateness or unfittingness or by the need to be "abreast of the times." But it can also be inhibited by the power of the tendency within the ego to form itself into a coherent, self-directing system. The need for a high .degree of individuality is weak in most people. They have little need "to see with their own eyes" or to "feel with their own senses." It is not so much the strength of the drive toward transcendence which accounts for this as it is the rudimentariness or feebleness of their sensitivity, or their reactiveness, toward remote symbols. These are the people who find it easy to conform with tradition, without having a strong feeling about "pastness." They have no need to reject, because they have no strong sensitivity and therefore do not feel the burden of traditionality and of the sacredness which it contains. They have no feeling of need to be absorbed into the sacredness imbedded in the past They neither conform compulsively nor reject compulsively. They are people who live

Tradition 203 within the framework of what is "given." If the given is "old," they accept it, if it is "new," they accept it equally readily. Those who have, however, a need for an internally generated coherence of experience and expression have a more active as well as a freer relationship to the "given." They incorporate elements of the "given" discriminatingly in accordance with criteria which are exercised outward from within rather than the other way round. Such persons are not likely to be ready recipients of traditionally transmitted beliefs or of beliefs with traditional content. The sheer force of intelligence or the power of the ego results in an assimilation and to some extent transformation of the content of traditional beliefs. The "past" is not rejected because it is the "past" "Pastness" and "givenness" are not the essential criteria of acceptance or rejection. The Burkean conception of tradition as an accumulation of wise judgments and prudent practice is a prototype of this kind of response to tradition. In principle, the rational individual might end by accepting very much of what is handed down through traditional transmission, not out of compulsiveness or passivity, not out of awe before a sacred past or because there is nothing else to do, but rather because it turns out on examination to be the most reasonable thing. True originality is a deflection of the line of traditional transmission. True originality extends the center of creativity into the individual and diminishes the determination of conduct by the external inheritance. Thus there is at the very root a war between originality and tradition. It is not, however, a war into which the original person is pushed willy-nilly by the sheer obstinacy of his character and the refusal to accept anything from the outside. Compulsive rejection and eruptive spontaneity have often been confused with originality or creativity, particularly in bohemian circles and among those who carry on their traditions.5 One of the major problems which confronts us in the analysis of tradition is the fusion of originality and traditionality. T. S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and Individual Talent," in The Sacred Wood, said very little more than that these two elements coexist and that originality works within the framework of traditionality. It adds and modifies, while accepting much. In any case, even though it rejects or disregards much of what it confronts in the particular sphere of its own creation, it accepts very much of what is inherited in the context of the creation. It takes its 3. Cf. W. I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918), vol. 2, in which the three types of bohemians, creative persons, and philistines are delineated. The bohemian is the compulsive refuser of tradition. The "philistine" is the unquestioning recipient who, in his own quiet way, makes modifications throuqh his inability or failure to live up to the demands of traditional standards, while not being in revolt against them. There may always be a little bit of revolt in the modification of traditional standards by the "philistine."

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Tradition 205 The creation within a relatively short time of relatively new traditions is the work of strong personalitiescharismatic persons, geniuses, etc. But not only creative persons who seek to do something positive deflect and change the "direction" of a tradition. Antinomians too, who have a primarily negative attitude toward the "given" and toward pastness, can often bring about a change by arousing the latent antinomian impulses which any pattern of order generates and by discrediting the custodians of the inherited. But antinomians are no more capable of creating a wholly new tradition than are geniuses. For one thing, they too are bound by the "given" framework within which they have their point of departure. They are seldom if ever complete antinomians, and so they leave intact some things of the tradition against which they revolt. Furthermore, their following is usually more bound by the given than are the dominant antinomian persons, and as a result the total transformation which they would instigate turns out only to be a modification. Moreover, the very idiom of rejection, the standards of rejection, are almost always acquired from some marginal strand of the general constellation of traditions which govern or are available in the society in which the antinomian lives. The element to which the loyalty is newly drawn has not been predominant. The antinomian rejects only the "normal" traditional norms and attaches himself to another, less prominent tradition into which he might, if he is strong enough; introduce a small variant. When the old "normal" tradition arouses enmity and is deserted, it yields some of the "center" to a previously marginal tradition. The new tradition may be no more than a rigorous and intense reaffirmation of certain principal elements in the traditional belief, or it may be something genuinely new in the society into which it is received, although imported from some other society where it was either a marginal or a central belief. In either case, the charismatic generation of the new beliefs, which are in their turn to become traditional, is accompanied by a high state of intensity of attachment to the sacred things ostensibly neglected by the "superseded" tradition. Tangible innovations in belief arouse among some of the proponents of the previously dominant traditional beliefs a state of intense consecration to a purer form of the once central tradition. This is said to be the genuine tradition of which the recently received form was a degradation. Some of the protectors and custodians of the displaced belief become passionate exponents of a "revived" tradition; they are "traditionalists." Both those who recommend the displacement of the once recommended traditional belief and those who recommend its observance in purified form are innovators. Whereas traditional beliefs which govern conduct in corporate bodies and primordial and civil collectivities yield when their "unfittingness" and the ineffectiveness of their recommending authorities become evident, innovations in traditional beliefs and procedures in science, scholarship, literature, and art have a different source. These are

point of departure from the "given" and goes forward from there, correcting, improving, and transforming. The results of original creation or discovery stand in the stream of tradition. They become a point of redirection of the line of tradition, retaining some elements of the tradition, diminishing the prominence of others, and introducing novelty as well. Innovation and Tradition A drastically generated, totally new tradition is one of the most improbable of events. As man arose from the primordial slime, acquired the human characeristics which go with a complex nervous systemthe capacity to store information and, therefore, memory, an awareness of his biological lineage, and a sensitivity to the outer reaches of the universehe must also have become sensitive and receptive to tradition. Henceforth, he became bound to the past, not justlis a physiological organism which is dependent on its genetic ancestry and its prior state, but by attachment to its symbols and the incorporation of its inheritance. Thus the way was open for innovations other than genetic mutations, but it was only partly opened, and, although the aperture has been widened since by the growth of rational powers and the growing multiplicity of alternatives, the path of innovation can never become completely open, "New" traditions emerge as modifications of already existing traditions. The degree of novelty, of course, can vary considerably. The increments may be infinitesimally small and accumulate slowly throughout a century. A long chain of transmission might be required for the naked eye to detect the variation of the content of the beliefs transmitted. On the other hand, a great prophet or great genius in science, in religion, in literature, or in art, himself beginning within the framework of a body of traditional belief or practice, may add so much in such a short time and have such a powerful influence on those who come after him that it could be said that a new tradition has been created. Even this departure, however, can never be a totally new tradition. It is at best only relatively newalthough some new things are newer than others. The consciousness of accepting a relatively new or a newly traditional belief, the feeling that one is in that significant respect different from those who accepted the old belief, is of course variable. The recipients of the new variant may actually believe that they are accepting totally new beliefs. The novelty which is attributed to the belief which they now espouse may be very much more important to them than what is more traditional within the complex of elements which constitutes the norm. They take for granted what is older and do not consider it important; they might indeed be unaware of its existence. But these observations refer only to the image of novelty among those who receive a relatively new variant of a tradition. The fact remains that completely disjunctive novelty in the sphere of belief is out of the question.

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Tradition 207 The structure of mind is such that once receiving what appears to be settled, a powerful intelligence or imagination will perceive flaws in it and possible improvements. This happens even in cultures and societies which are unsympathetic to originality, while in those where there is a high appreciation of it even less intelligent and imaginative minds try to attain it. Creative innovations in literary traditions and artistic production have a different structure from creative innovations in traditional scientific and scholarly beliefs. There is more "room for maneuver" in the former. In the latter, the scientist may freely choose his problem from among the recently canvassed problems, but what he attends to in the way of earlier and current theories and data is rigorously controlled by the opinion of his section of the "scientific community. Increased eminence increases freedom regarding the choice of theories and data to consider, but even the great scientist cannot move among the elements of the available tradition with the freedom of the literary man or artist The scientist is not free to draw his substantive inspiration from Galileo or Newton and to disregard what his contemporaries have done. The literary man can go back to the Marquis de Sade or Count de Lautr6amont, the painter can go back to Hieronymus Bosch and no one will raise an eyebrow at him. (Nowadays he will even be praised for such a selection from among-the traditions which are available to him.) The artist or literary man accepts a prevailing form insofar as it is "fitting" to his ambitions. There is already a wide variety of forms, not all of them equally current or recommended at the moment, in which his "genius" can find some sort of accommodation. Within the categories of versenarrative, lyrical, or epicwithin the novel or short story, the portrait, landscape, or still life, he tries to view and see and express what he has seen and felt in himself. If his creative powers are weak, he will accept what is given and work within it If they are strong, he will modify the received genre as well as express his own substantive viewpoint and sensibility. What he accomplishes depends on his capacity-to form a coherent whole of what he accepts from what has come down to him as part of the corpus of traditional objectivations and what his own imaginative powers require. An inherited form, if it has had great works accomplished in it, does not simply disappear; it is discriminatingly assimilated and extended. If the naturalistic novel has ceased to be a fertile form through which the imagination expresses itself, it is because rich imaginations who wish to express something which was not expressed in the naturalistic novel no longer attach themselves and seek to work within its form. Of course, not all of the refusal of a traditional form within a genre is creative. Much of it is imitative of a creation which transforms; when this happens, a "new" tradition has been created. Some innovations do not find

subjected to modification in consequence of the disclosure of new possibilities in the traditionally received beliefs, arising from their confrontation by exceptional intelligence and imagination. This kind of creativity is not the product of the breakdown of the hitherto traditionally received beliefs arising from the failure of their custodians to control the situation and adapt the society or the corporate body to the new circumstances. It does not arise because the traditionally transmitted beliefs have failed to remain in some sort of "appropriate" relationship to the circumstances of their believers but because the intelligence and imagination of new recipients of the traditional beliefs have perceived defects in what Has been transmitted. The creative powers themselves cause the breakdown of the hitherto traditionally transmitted beliefs. The disclosure of deficiencies and gaps in the hitherto received traditions, and efforts to correct or improve upon them, sometimes involve far-reaching modifications in the whole pattern of belief. Every system of thought, every creative pattern which exists has such possibilities inherent in it. Science is a continuously, partially self-dissolving and selfreorganizing pattern, produced through the power of the human mind working under the discipline of training within the framework of its own traditions. No system of thought, no pattern of expressive objectivation is ever wholly closed. It only appears closed because the guardians of the system at a particular stage may be incapable of introducing and are able to resist innovations to be made in it. They can control the recruitment, and training of persons and opportunities for expression of those who work on these subjects, and they can criticize them so negatively when they do express themselves that they do not succeed in finding a following. Thus they can hamper innovations in the traditional patterns of belief. Originality may fall into such a state of disrepute and the negative sanctions attending its manifestations may be so severe that there is no incentive to modify the system by perceiving gaps and deficiencies, inconsistencies, incompatibilities, etc. Every pattern of symbolic objectivation has within it an inherent potentiality for transformation in a limited number of directions. We'may even say, where the traditions of society and the organization and custody of the institutions which guard these patterns of thought and analysis are watchful against innovations, that still innovations must necessarily be made and are always being made. Sometimes they are made with the intention of reaffirming and insisting on the coherence and validity of what has been traditionally received. But insofar as restless human intelligence confronts these systems which claim to be closed and settled, modifications will necessarily be made. It is the ineluctable fate of every system of thought and every pattern of expression. They will only cease to grow when they are totally disregarded and no strong mind ever concerns itself with them.

208 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus extension as a new tradition because they are too difficult to practice. But even those, like Ulysses, change the direction of tradition by providing new elements to be assimilated into the previously prevailing tradition.'1 Modern culture, permeated by a high evaluation of genius which breaks through the bounds of traditional beliefs and practices to attain to a new level of the objective truth or to express the essence of the self s imagination and sensibility more completely, encourages a free attitude toward the traditional objectivations. But it cannot be completely free as long as the educational system and the system of exhibition first presents these works as the monuments of the past, which dominate for a time at least the attention of those who will later seek to produce works of their own. Creative powers in practically all instances are first aroused in their presence"primitives" and "uneducated poets" who are genuinely "primitive" and "uneducated" are practically nonexistentand however much geniuses diverge from the received as they reach the heights of their powers, they do have their point of departure in-the received. In literature and in painting and sculpture, ^the modern culture of originality or genius is greatly favored by the relatively uninstitutionalized system of training and qualification of writers and artists. Institutions generally are not and have not been seedbeds of originality. Institutions and corporate bodies usually permit creativity and the refusal of traditional beliefs only in response to the exigencies of external situations, and even then frequently against internal resistance. Nonetheless, in the presence of the culture of originality, universities which m their beginnings were intended to rediscover the wisdom of the past, to reaffirm it and transmit it, have become major bearers of the tradition of the creative modification and extension of traditional belief. Research institutes which are not at all concerned with the transmission of the received tradition are even more concentrated on the modification and extension of traditional beliefs in the particular fields in which they are active. In order to achieve what they do, these institutions must inculcate and accept a massive corpus of traditional beliefs, i.e. the large body of scientific and humanistic knowledge. Consequently, the weight of tradition within them is very great, and correspondingly the restraint on spontaneity is also very great. Without this traditional restraint, however, without the inculcation of this vast body of what has already been achieved, the creative powers of the young scientists and scholars would 4.1 reject Alfred Weber's conception of culture as an activity and a body of works which are not cumulative in their relations to each other and which, unlike science, are constantly being regenerated and renewed. Alfred Weber thought that cultural accomplishments (art, literature, philosophy) do not rest on past achievement; they are not part of a cumulative and developing tradition but depend exclusively on the stock of creativity existing in a given population among those seeking to practice a particular expressive genre. Cf. Weber, "Prinzipielles zur Kultursoziologie." Archiv fiir Sozialwissenschaft, vol. 47 (1920), pp. 1-49.

Tradition 209 agitate themselves randomly and arbitrarily in a sterile void. They would have no platform to stand-on and from which to depart. They would make many more false starts than they do, and the best of them would often only rediscover what is already known. Only the most powerful minds and the most self-disciplined would hit upon what is essential in the motley and heterogeneous -traditions which would be generated by such a disorderly condition. The less talented and the moderately endowed would be astray much of the time. And even the genius, in a situation in which he was cut off from the existing institutionally reproduced and extended tradition, would be less fruitful because he would fail to rediscover all that he needed to know in order to work with an effectiveness commensurate with his capacities. Thus, the great work of Ramanujan is to some extent a psychological and historical curiosity, because he rediscovered, by himselfalthough not entirely by himself since he did have some elementary mathematical training in school and collegeimportant things which were already known. It was only when he brought himself to the attention of Hardy and Littlewood and was brought to Cambridge that he acquired more fully the most recent tradition of mathematical knowledge. His great creative powers then had a few years in which to add to the stock of mathematical knowledge. But the years of isolation had rendered him ignorant of certain techniques which, had he known them, would have facilitated the working of his creative powers. In literature, a man of Ramanujan's exceptional genius would have been.-less handicapped by his institutional isolation. The custodians of literary and artistic traditions are less exigent and less powerful in imposing their expectations. The literary and artistic worlds with all their cliques and tyrannies are freer than the scientific and scholarly worlds because they have neither the consensus nor the authoritative institutions of universities, research institutes, and scientific and scholarly journals. Nonetheless, it is these institutions which make possible a continuous extension of the traditions of their subjects and the continuous accumulation, not just of fact, but of deeper analytical penetration, which reaches further and further into the nature of the universe or the nature of the human activities and productions which engages the minds active within those institutions. Of course, these institutions contribute more to the orderly development and elaboration and deepening of the traditional norms of scientific and humanistic knowledge than they do to profound and disjunctive "revolutions" in their subjects. Modern economic enterprises, oriented as they are to the maximization of returns and guided by the principle of efficiency, are also innovative institutions. The institutionalization of research on processes and products guarantees this at present, but even before research became integral to larger business organisations, enterprisers were innovators. They were driven to make innovations, not only because of

It J B l 210 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus Tradition 211 bring in new goods and new ideas. These are only a few of the changes instigated from outside the social system. Within the society too changes take place as a result of changes in the balance of power of the different sectors. The tendencies of the powerful to expand the sphere of their power, the efforts of the inferior in strength and deference to protect themselves from further subjugation and indignity generate conflicts. But even where these conditions are not significantly operative, there is probably a process of internal modification constantly going. The mechanisms of the traditional transmission are always bound to be faulty in some way, and stupidity and recalcitrance support the resistive dispositions. Faulty memory, negligence, and the need to avoid distress cause traditional beliefs to be eroded, even though those who make these changes believe that they still believe what they previously believed. The resistance of each new generation to the authority of the elders also causes minor modificationsand sometimes major ones. There might well be no continuous line of change; the changes might be random variations which in the course of a half century produce visible changes. Small improvements are impelled by considerations of expediency; critical intelligence also prompts modifications in procedures which in turn produce changes in beliefs. The accretion of new elements need be neither explicit nor intentional. Modifications can also be intentional and deliberate and the agents of modification may regard them as quite within the "spirit" of traditions, or, on the other hand, they may regard them as contrary to that spirit. In other words, the modification of tradition has no implications.regarding the self-consciousness and deliberateness of the innovation or a sense of persistence or alienation on the part of those who are the agents and the recipients of modified traditional norms.5 One must of course also mention once more the continuous internal pressure within the personality for the reshaping of traditional transmitted beliefs. Part of this pressure comes from the need to make them fit the individual personality systemevery personality system having a modicum of uniqueness and more or less need for individuality. Thus, the actual variety of personalities, all of whom have the same traditional 5. Nonetheless, where intentional modifications are experienced as contrary to the spirit of the tradition, they might well leave some trace of guilt and resentment on the part of those who have instigated them. This might also be true where the modification is not intentional but where, for one reason or another, because it is sufficiently gross to be noticed by those who participate in the modification or because of a shift in the form and name of the institution which carried out the traditional norm, it is thought to be contrary to tradition. It is much more likely to do so insofar as, consciously or unconsciously, even if incorrectly, the agents of the modification believe that they have been responsible for bringing about the deviation from the traditional belief to such an extent that it appears to them to be no longer a member of the same family of traditional belief to which it formerly belonged.

the tradition of innovation under which the leading personalities worked and by their relative emancipation from primordial and autochthonous ties but because of the exigencies of the intra- and international markets, which forced them to make innovations to satisfy new demands and to deal with changes in the supply and price of labor, raw materials, technology, political conditions, and the appearance of new competitors. Criticized though they have nearly always been for their lack of piety toward the past, businessmen too have their traditionstraditions of firms, traditions of workmanship, traditions of ways to deal with colleagues and competitors. These are usually traditions which entail attachments to practices and to beliefs accepted in the past. But alongside these, there are traditions of innovation of how to adapt to external changes and of the need to initiate changes. The more the responsible authorities of a firm try to benefit from research on processes and products, the more their fate becomes intertwined with the profession of scientific and technological research in which respect for the tradition of sciencein substance and in procedureis intimately linked with a well-rooted aspiration to go beyond it. They build from the platform of the traditionally inherited stock of knowledge and normative procedures which contain much knowledge tested by experience and sometimes even tested by scientific procedures. Like innovations in scientific traditions, technological innovations too have their point of departure in what has previously been received. They take very much of it for granted. They take for granted that which they are not seeking to modify, but for the time being the desire to invent something new is directed to one element rather than to the others, the rest of the traditionally given practices being accepted, at least temporarily.

The Gradual Modification of Traditional Beliefs Modification is the inevitable fate of traditional beliefs. Leaving out, for the time being, the antinomian tendencies and resentments against authority which are inherent in the relationships of authority, traditions would still be under continuous pressure toward modification. It is often said that "traditional societies" are unchanging societies. It is not likely, however, that any society could remain unchanged through several generations. For one thing, changes are constantly being imposed by changes in the environment; poor harvests, epidemics of disease among human beings and livestock, demographic changes, the exhaustion of resources, make adaptation imperative. Then too no society, even a small and relatively isolated society, is free of the pressures of military intrusion from the outside, and the controls which an intermittently active, enveloping state seeks to enforce also bring about adaptive changes. Emigration into another society and the occasional return of the emigrant bring in new conceptions. Itinerant traders and merchants

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Tradition 213 center into a hitherto peripheral group, linguistic, religious or ethnic, insofar as it is successfuland does not precipitate passionate resistance, also results in the modification of the received traditional beliefs. The power of the peripheral culture to resist obliteration by the culture of the center is partially offset by its incapacity under most conditions of modern central government to refuse all permeative influence. The expansion of centers into peripheries results in a modification of the substantive content of traditional beliefs, and, in the course of time, the modifications at -the periphery work their way back into the center. The institutional custodians of the traditional beliefs of the center and they will vary according to the different institutionsusually demand a more far-reaching observance than the inhabitants of the peripheral sectors are willing to grant. Indeed, within each institutional subsystem of society, the center, that is, the rulers, the bishops, the priests, and the judges, the teachers in the universities and the schools, the generals and the colonels in the army, the politicians and the civil servants in the state, etc., are usually more insistentin their promulgation, recommendation, and exemplification of traditional beliefson the observance of traditional norms of the center than are the peripheries, the "rank and file," the laity, the working classes, the poor, etc. The latter groups have their own traditional beliefs which bear some familial likeness to those of the center, but these peripheral variants have a relatively autonomous, self-sustaining existence. The outcome is a compromise between the culture of the center and the culture of the periphery. The compromise takes the form of modifications of the peripheral traditional beliefs in the direction of the central traditional beliefs. This indeed is what is involved, in its cultural aspect, in the incorporation of the periphery into the center. But in the course of time, the culture of the center begins to yield in the opposite direction. This is what has happened in the United States over the past one hundred and fifty years; it is what is happening in Great Britain at present. A few pockets of the "pure culture," or less modified culture, of traditional beliefs survive. Gradual Modification by the Custodians of Traditional Beliefs Even in those institutions which are established to maintain and stabilize traditional beliefs on the basis of the study of sacred textssuch as theological seminaries and in law schools, both in the jurisdictions of Anglo-American law and of the Civil Codegradual modification is bound to occur, whenever an effort to systematize and penetrate to the more, fundamental principles occurs. Even in India, great philosophers could not resist the temptation to "improve" the inherited doctrine, with which nominally they found no fault. The same is true of the medieval theology and in the various codifications of the Talmud. The poorer the intellectual quality of the custodians, that is, the

beliefs recommended to them, brings about certain modifications in interpretation and application; these modifications are carried further through re-enunciation and retransmission. This is quite apart from the need for individuality and the strength of the impulsion toward it. Even dull philistines are not exactly alike, despite what may be said about their conformity, uniformity, etc. And of course there are the antinomian tendencies with which we have already dealt, and these too certainly necessitate the modification of the received traditional norms, where they do not actually bring about a far-reaching and deep rejection of them. The modification of traditional beliefs and practices proceeds at different rates throughout any society. Some sections of the society are more likely to accept the traditional beliefs without making any very serious modifications in them. However, other sections of society may contribute modifications from different directions, and within the same society there will always be some parts which reject"; indeed, the more intense and aggressive the rejection, the greater the likelihood that some section of the society will be brought into action which affirms with equal intensity and passion the crucial elements in the family of traditional norms prevailing in the society. As a result, what the traditionalists promulgate and emphasize diverges rather widely from what is normally accepted by the different sections which are themselves bringing about different forms and modes of modification. Where there exist particular institutions and associated professions for the maintenance and transmission of traditional norms, the pressure for modification will be greater at the peripheries of the central institutional system, which do not come so fully under the hegemony of these institutions but which are in sufficient contact with them to make the traditional beliefs partially effective influences on thought and conduct. The peripheral zones which we are considering here may be ethnically peripheral but in the same territory; they may be territorially peripheral, as are the back country or the frontier; they may be peripheral in the status system, as are the lumpenproletariat or some "new class" which has not been fully incorporated into the traditional central value system of the society. In every year of human history, peripheral new generations have to be incorporated into the belief system. The young generation is always a peripheral generation, even where its elders are in the center of society. The oldest generations, whose declining mental powers cause them to fall away from the beliefs of their mature years, are another section of the society who at least in their own conduct modify the traditional beliefs which they received. They are far less important, of course, than the younger generations because of their peripheral power position, even though they too might belong to the center of society by their kinship connections and their earlier occupational roles. The effort to expand the area of reception of traditional belief from the

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Tradition 215 emerge from this intensive scrutiny of the received and prevailing beliefs and from the application of the results of this scrutiny to particular instances. This kind of process is much less likely to occur among the nonintellectual laity. (The deviations from traditional beliefs in the latter are, as we have said repeatedly, likely to have quite other sources; these are primarily the perception of the "unfittingness" of the traditional beliefs, indifference to the traditional beliefs, and animosity, either compulsive or expediential, against traditional beliefs.) Drastic Transformations of Traditional Beliefs The modification of traditional beliefs usually takes place in the form of small innovations made by many persons which are not thought to depart significantly from the traditional belief, to the extent that they are thought to depart at all. Corrections or "better interpretations" or needed adaptations are made without a sense that anything essential has been renounced. Conversions, fundamental discoveries, "scientific revolutions" which are drastically disjunctive, do occur and find a following, so that in the course of time the line of the traditional belief turns into a radically different direction. It takes some time until many become aware of how much they have departed from the previously prevailing tradition. Great innovators vary in the extent to which they disavow or attack the previously prevailing tradition. In drastic religious innovation, the innovator goes back some distance before the most recent form of the tradition to find a strand in the past of which he is the continuation. In science, there is usually no recourse to an earlier and better stage of the most recent tradition. Nor is there such recourse in drastic innovations in legal traditions. In politics there often is such a pretension of "return." The judiciary arid the law teachers, on the offier hand, in the"common law areas of the world and in those areas which are governed exclusively by codes and legislation, make their modifications while believing and, above all, claiming that they are operating entirely within the framework of the tradition which has been handed down to them. In most of these types of innovation, a traditional legitimation is indispensable, although it is uncertain whether there is any relation between the degree of fundamental novelty of the new belief and the extent to which its protagonist recommends it with(a traditional legitimation. But how revolutionary are the revolutions' which are~*1niare by great scientists and by philosophers of law like Bentham? The great transformations in science are made in accordance with certain principles which in themselves are to a large extent traditionally received, as far as the innovator is concerned. Fundamental transformations in law and in science are not total transformatiojt^and^d^not ordinarily claim toTe such; fundamental transformations in religion usuallyLmakejjuch_claims

personnel of the institutions in question, the more likely the tradition is to be transmitted with unnoticeable changes, if there are any changes introduced at all. The prestige of the sacred in any society is such, however, that it cannot avoid attracting the best, the most intelligent and imaginative minds to its care. The strain toward "improvement" of the traditionally received beliefs is therefore inevitable. Even where these superior intelligences believe that there is nothing wrong but wish only to strengthen and to make more clear and apparent to everyone that the truth is already contained in the doctrines which they are analyzing, codifying, systematizing, and demonstrating, the changes will take place. This is so quite apart from any antiauthoritarian tendencies or antitraditional tendencies in the minds and personalities of the persons in question. The decisive fact here is the intellectual power and the challenge which any potentially problematic phenomenon offers to a powerful intellect to improve an inherited pattern of belief and to solve the problems which are apparent to it This is most obvious in science, in which such disciplined improvement is an integral part of the undertaking. Theologically systematized religious traditions contain within themselves certain fundamental antinomies which can never be reconciled and which therefore constantly offer challenges to powerful minds, who hope, being convinced as they are of the truth of the doctrine, that they can resolve these antinomies. Law courts operate within a massiveand heterogeneoustradition of enacted laws and judicial decisions; the creativity of the judges is bound and restricted by the relatively high "sacredness" of what they have inherited, but it is also given opportunities by the plurality of traditional beliefs available to them in the body of their inheritance. The judges seek the "true meaning" of the law, but the existingthe receivedbody of laws and precedents is only the point of departure for their creative "discovery." Given approximate identity of problems and the same degree of attachment to the traditionally inherited body of beliefs on the part of the laity and on the part of the professionals who are specifically charged with the interpretation of the tradition, the rate of innovation attributable to rational considerations among the professionals will exceed the rate of "natural" modification current among the laity. (Where the laity is less attached to traditions than the professionals and where the professionals' traditions do not include the use of reason, the laity will change more rapidly than the professionals.) The modifications introduced by intellectualstheologians, philosophers, judges of superior courtsare likely to be in the direction of the introduction of greater consistency and explicitness and a greater stress on "underlying principles" which had hitherto been left implicit. In the course of this systematization and formalizationformal rationalization new possibilities will be discerned, within the framework of what is logically possible, in the traditional belief system. Relatively new beliefs

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Tradition 217 ring from within those who share the commontraditionalculture of science, will be more continuous with the previously dominant beliefs, even though the rate of change might in fact be more rapid in that sphere of traditional beliefs than in the other spheres. The relations between the pattern of beliefs prior to a fundamental transformation and one which follows are often obscured by the idiom of the new beliefs. The minor disjunctions which separate traditionally transmitted beliefs from new beliefs are often blurred by the reassertion of the traditionally transmitted beliefs in the idiom of the new beliefs, as well as by the antitraditional rhetoric of "total""Tnnovations. The assessment of the magnitude of a radical fundamental transformation is extremely difficult, because no transformation is total and because traditional beliefs, although often very tenacious, are in fact capable of extreme attenuation and perhaps even of disappearance at quite a deep level. Fundamental categories, fundamental expectations often survive fundamental transformation. Nonetheless, there is often a disjunction introduced by fundamental transformations, and some of their innovations persist to become traditional beliefs in their own right. The probability of the persistence of a radical transformation is probably a function of the strength of the power position in the center of society of its chief proponents. The probability of "catching on" is a function of-the prominence and the charisma of authority and of the authorities' power to coerce the adherents of traditional beliefs into silence. The resistive capacity of traditional beliefs in the face of the pressure of an aspiring radical fundamental transformation is a function of a weak central authority. The survival of traditional beliefs in latent form during periods of disruptions and displacement is also a function of the continuity of personality systems and of certain institutions, like the family and religious communities, which manage to withstand at least partially the rapid and far-reaching changes in other spheres. The personality systems have a measure of toughness, and even after periods of severe deprivation and disorganization they reassert themselves with most of the same properties they possessed before disruption. Many traditional beliefs which become assimilated into the personality system by virtue of the implicit or explicit dispositions toward authority become cathetic objects of the personality. When after some disturbance the personality system becomes reequilibrated, old needs again become effective and with them their symbolic objects, namely the traditional beliefs. Thus traditional beliefs regarding deference relations between classes, between authorities and subjects of authority, regarding rights and obligations, even though they undergo a radical change during a crisis period, settle back into an approximation to their previous pattern. The family manifests a greater resiliency and recuperative power than corporate bodies which are not centered on primordial qualities. The

while referringj.9jtti4.pa.st as a legitimation. In the arts, the agents of "fundamental transformations might claim, but have not always done so, to be invalidating all of the tradition and to be replacing it by something new. But in all cases of fundamental innovation, much of the past remains, both among_thojSjta3SLhojn_it is. recommended and in the work"" of the fundamental innovator as wel^ir_ We should perhaps distinguish these fundamental transformations in which the past not only persists at many points in the new pattern of thought but is treated in some respects as a source of legitimacy of the new beliefs from "radical" transformations. Radical transformations are fundamental transformations which seek explicitly to break the connection with the past and to institute an "entirely new" pattern of belief. Radicalism is the criticism of the "fundamentals" of traditional beliefs. It comes frequently from outside the institutional system, which is devoted to the custody and development of the traditional beliefs in question. Radical or revolutionary criticism of traditional beliefs about social organization, about literature and art, are often found among bohemians, freelance writers, and persons who have never entered, who have withdrawn from, or have been excluded from the central cultural institutional system. It is less likely to originate in established or incorporated intellectual and cultural institutions where the traditions are cultivated, (it is the work of intellectuals who have not fully assimilated the heavy inheritance which is transmitted by universities and academies, law schools and courts, seminaries and churches, or who even when they possess the relevant corpus of culture have not found a positive role in the institutions which carry hVJ^yta,? i^4eJi\ t, <&*&*$ In the course of time, the established intellectual institutions and > cultural institutions assimilate into their own traditional patterns of thought much of the radical transformations which have originated from the outside. The new belief becomes estabHshed.anjltraditionalized in ihe_ center either as a result of the responsiveness of some sectors of the center to opinion outside themselves or because of the accession to positions of authority by persons who have previously been peripheral. The ostensibly wholly disjunctive and antitraditional belief comes then to be accepted by one or more sectors of the center. This is much more likely to occur with respect to political and religious beliefs than with respect to the beliefs of the scientific and scholarly elites. As to the latter beliefs, it is more likely to occur in beliefs about literary and artistic expressive thingsthan in the natural sciences. Beliefs in the natural sciences have no laity to speak of. They have acolytes but no laymen. The tradition of beliefs in the sciences is passed on from generation to generation within their own bounded communities. This is less true of arts and social sciences and much less so of religious, political, economic, and "moral" matters. For these reasons, the transformations of traditional beliefs in the natural sciences, occur-

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bonds of kinshipthe ties of bloodand affection can survive revolutions. Even where a particular family may break down, the rupture of the personality system, when it is reequilibrated, reestablishes the same type of family system. Primordial attachments gratify the most irrepressible and ineluctible needs, and for that reason such attachments are not lightly disavowed. The diffuseness of the obligations generated by primordial attachments demand and permit a greater adaptiveness in the face of pressure from the environmenUThe family is the source and support of a diffuse readiness to accept traditional beliefs and the survival and recuperation of families reestablishes the conditions conducive to the reception of traditional beliefs".. _ v ... A. { Traditional religious beliefs also have a great capacity to withstand the * traumatic pressure of revolutionary crises, and, even where the church and the ecclesiastical profession might actually be dissolved and public religious practice forbidden, still the traditional religious beliefs prove their capacity for survival and self-reassertion in the course of time. Like the tenacity of traditional beliefs which rest on primordial needs, the tenacity of traditional religious beliefs rests on needs to be in contact with the sacred. Since these are more unevenly distributed in a population than primordial needs, specifically religious traditional beliefs have less recuperative power, once displaced, than those whichregardless of their contentare dependent on familially maintained dispositions.

i To persons who are not murderers, concentration camp administrators, or dreamers of sadistic fantasies, the inviolability of human life seems to be so self-evident that it might appear pointless to inquire about it. It is embarrassing as well because, once raised, the issue seems to commit us to beliefs we do not wish to espouse. Yet because of a conjunction of circumstances, it is worthwhile to discuss it One of these circumstances is the decline of Christian belief about the place of man in the divine scheme and the consequent diminution of its adduction as a criterion in the judgment of the worth and permissibility of human actions. As long as it was believed that man was created and had been assigned a destiny by God, it seemed evident that man's life was a sacred entity. It was sacred in the sense that it partook of the very nature of the universe, and it was for that reason that his biological vitality and his soulor mindwere not to be subjected to the transforming manipulations of other human beings. The cognitive content of Christian doctrine, and above all the grandiose Christian symbolization of man's origin and destiny, have lost much of their appeal. Large sections of contemporary Western societies, particularly the highly educated, do not, by and large, believe in the immortality of the soul. They probably do not believe in a soul at all. (Some of them even allege that they do not believe in the existence of mind.) If there is no God, no divine creation, no immortality of the soul, no redemption, why should man's life be regarded with any more reverence than the lives of wild and domestic animals which we hunt and eat, or pets which we cherish? Another of the epochal circumstances which has caused us to raise the questions discussed in this paper is the advancement of the life sciences and the technological possibilities based on them. Physiological knowledge has been in the process of growth for three centuries, but in recent decades its progress has become much more fundamental. (The advance is to some extent a function of the great improvement in instrumental technology.) Surgery is also old, but it has become vastly more daring in its undertakings and proficient in its accomplishments in recent decades. The life sciences seem on the verge of an efflorescence like that through which the physical sciences' passed during the first half of the present Previously published in a slightly different form in Encounter, vol. 28 (1967), pp. 39-49.

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century. They are beginning to attract talents, in large numbers, of the quality that physics attracted in its recent very great period. As a result, life scientists and physicians and surgeons are acquiring the knowledge and the capacities to intervene purposefully and effectively in the course of the life of individuals and of the reproduction of generations such as have never been possessed before. Alongside these heightened powers of observation of the human organism and intervention into its vital processes, the powers of observingof seeing and hearingand of reaching into the social behavior of human beings, have also increased correspondingly. These latter developments are in part functions of technological improvement; in part they are functions of greater curiositygreater sympathy and more scientific detachmentand an aspiration for a more far-reaching surveillance and control, which are thought to be called for by the larger size of the corporate bodies into which so much of modern society is organized. We live also in an epoch in which one of the most famous countries, Germany, not particularly dechristianized as compared with the other countries of the modern world, participated in the deliberate murder of numerous millions of persons of alien ethnic stocks. Mankind was used to the destruction of lives by war incidentally to the pursuit of military ends, and to murder by individuals out of powerfully passionate and transient impulses. The Nazi destruction was, however, so unprecedented in its scale, organizedness, persistence, and "rationality" that many sensitive persons have come to feel that we live unsteadily suspended over an abyss of unlimited murderous ness. Another memorial of this epoch is the dropping of the two nuclear bombs at the end of the Second World War. Each of these destroyed more human lives than any other single and separate action performed by a small number of men had ever done before. The nuclear weapons were made possible by the scientific research done in the present century by some of the greatest minds of human history. The fading of Christian belief and the plausible confidence of the biomedical sciences, acting jointly with our awareness of the destructive capacities of sadism served by large-scale organizationwhich was also occasionally justified by the invocation of pseudoscientific genetic doctrines and which was attended by some alleged medical experiments and of genuinely outstanding scientific genius in the service of, or utilized for, military purposes in the atomic bomb, have raised the fundamental question of how the human race as we have known it, with all its deficiencies, is to be protected from the murderous and manipulative wickedness of some of its members and the scientific and technological genius of others. Each of these major factors working alone would have raised questions about the grounds on which one man's life or individuality may be interfered with, changed, or discontinued, and the factors which might extend or restrict such acts of intervention. Their confluence

renders it desirable to consider the whole problem more closely. This is we ask the questions whether life is sacred, and how far morality permits and how far the law should allow us to intervene into reproduction, the course of life, and the constitution of individuality and privacy.

II Despite the diminution of theological belief among the educated, many persons, including the educated, experience a sense of abhorrence in the face of the new or prospective capacities of geneticists, neurosurgeons, psychiatrists, psychologists, and electronics engineers to intervene into what has hitherto been regarded largely as given by man's ancestry and his "natural" cognitive and moral powers. The loosening of the hold of ancestry, the circumvention of normal sexual intercourse as a precondition of procreation, the modification of memory, temperament, and sensory experience, all produce an effect of shock in many persons. The shock is not just the shock of surprise in the presence of novelty. It seems to possess elements of a deep abhorrence or revulsion. We see it in the struggles of courts and lawyers to cope with these new facts of human existence. We see it in the responses of those who still accept the Christian views of man, and we see it among the agnostic humanists who think that their view of the world is entirely secular and utilitarian. But when it comes to the formulation of an intellectually coherent and acceptable justification of the sense of abhorrence, there seem to be difficulties. Why do so many persons experience this vague and sometimes passionate revulsion at the thought of a deliberate modification of the genetic determinants of the life of a human being, or of the modification of the personality by a neurosurgical operation, or of the observation and recording of a conversation which is believed by the participants to be held away from the awareness of anyone except themselves? Can this revulsion be explained by a persisting commitment to the doctrine that man is a creature of a divine act and that it is not for man himself to undertake to form or modify the highest of God's creatures? This explanation might account for those who are avowedly Christian believers, or who are otherwise attached to one of the great world religions. What about those who experience this abhorrence but who are, as far as they know, not subscribers to the view that man is God's creature, that his soul is a part of a divine scheme and that it does not fall within man's proper jurisdiction to tamper with it? One interpretation of this response is that the latter are the victims, unwitting to be sure, of the Christian conception of man, even though they themselves do not believe in Christianity. The tree of Christian belief has been felled but the roots are still in their minds. Their revulsion is nothing but a vestigial feeling left over from beliefs to which they no longer accord validity. It is quite possible that there is some truth in this interpretation, but I

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doubt whether it is really the whole truth. If it is wholly true, then the ground and reason for the revulsion disintegrate. The revulsion which many people feel in contemplation of the prospect of human intervention into the chain which binds us to our ancestry, into the constitution of our individuality, and into the islands of privacy which surround individuality, would appear then to be no more than a prejudice, utterly irrational and unjustifiable by rational argument. I myself do not share this latter view either of the motivation of those who feel the revulsion against the manipulation of life and individuality or of the rationality of the grounds in principle for being morally distrustful or repelled by these activities to which we will refer as "contrived intervention." It seems to me that the apprehension about the intervention of medical, psychological, and electronic technology has an even deeper source in human existence than is to be found in Christian theology. The source of the revulsion or apprehension is deeper than culture of Christianity and its doctrine of the soul. Indeed, it might be said that the Christian doctrine was enabled to maintain its long prosperity and -to become so effective because it was able to conform for so many centuries to a deeper, proto-religious "natural metaphysic." Human beings do have a conception of the "normal" or the "natural," and it is not simply a function of what is statistically the most frequent or a product of indoctrination, although both play a part in forming its content and maintaining it Much of this conception of the "normal" or the ''natural" centers on heterosexuality, lineage ties, and the integrity of the human organism and its memory. Such developments as the transplantation of organs, the implantation of substitute organs made from inorganic materials, the instigation and control of human reproductive processes independently of sexual intercourseartificial inovulation and inseminationthe prospective modification of genetic constitution, the modification of personality qualities by prefrontal lobotomy, electrical shock therapy, the transformation of memory by electronic devices or chemical substances, the pharmaceutical transformation of the senses and the imagination, etc., all generate in different ways among a variety of persons some apprehension about the dangers of deviation from the "normal" or the "natural" which are obscurely intimated by these increased powers. These apprehensions are not just vestiges of archaic theological beliefs. They are direct responses to sacrilege. The response is accentuated by the fact that these very possibilities are greeted by numerous persons with great enthusiasm. Those who are put off by these new possibilities, who shudder at the sight or thought of this new Promethean aspiration to do things which lay hitherto beyond human powers, are further alarmed by the enthusiasts. There is a more widespread anxiety about the moral status of these interventions and about the institutional controls which would restrict their uses for

diabolical purposes and which would seek to develop legal rules and institutions adequate to deal with new conceptions or criteria of death, parenthood, etc. Indeed.'it is often the unqualified enthusiasm of the proponents and prophets of "controlled intervention" which disturbs and alarms those who would have misgivings enough about the new possibilities without having to confront the enthusiasts. It must, however, be acknowledged that the enthusiasts stand in a great tradition. The improvement of the physical quality of life, the aspiration to a life without pain or unhappiness, the improvement in human powers and the pleasure in the exercise of the powers of knowing and constructingthe prizing of these accomplishments is part of our most valuable traditions. Yet there are probably also some motives which are less worthyaspirations to omnipotence, desires to manipulate the individuality and to intrude on the privacy of human beings and therewith to enjoy the experience of degrading them. These latter motives, to the extent that they are thought to exist, reinforce the apprehensions about Prometheanism. It should be remembered, however, that Prometheus was a benefactor of the human race who suffered because he sought to displace the gods by diffusing their powers among men. Those who stand uneasily apart from the recent biomedical and technological advances might not believe that there are certain kinds of knowledge which belong only to God; but they are not confident about the wisdom or the self-restraint of man in dealing with the sanctity of life and in respecting the "natural" or the "normal" in which that sacredness is' incorporated. Obviously these conceptions have been influenced by Christian culture, but they are not simply left-over fragments from a Christianity which has begun to recede. Ill The chief feature of the protoreligious, "natural metaphysic" is the affirmation that life is sacred. It is believed to be sacred not necessarily as a manifestation of a transcendent creator from whom "life comes: it is believed to be sacred because it is life. The idea of sacredness is generated by the primordial experience of being alive, of experiencing the elemental sensation of vitality and of fearingits extinction. Man stands in awe before his own vitality, the vitality of his lineage and of his species. The sense of awe is the attribution of sanctity, and all else which man feels to be sacred derives its sanctity because it controls or embraces that sacred vitality of the individual, the lineage, and the species. By vitality, I should emphasize, I do not refer simply to physiological processes. I include the mental powers of perception, imagination, and reason as well. The fear of the extinction of vitality, of one's own organism, of the

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r 224 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus The Sanctity of Life 225 species and of one's own lineage, testifies to the primordial attachment to the elemental fact of vitality. What U at work here is not merely the attachment of the individual human organism, experiencing and appreciating its own vitality; it is also an appreciation of the continuing vitality of one's own'breed and progeny, unborn and unknown, the vitality of the territorial and civil community of which one is a member, and the vitality of the species. Within this context, these are thought to be "normal" or "natural" modes of embodiment of the vital. When we speak of the sanctity of life, it is of these forms of life that we speak. To say that the idea of the sacred is at bottom the appreciation of vitality requires some explanation. It requres explanation because it seems to be so contradictory to the usual idea which asserts that the sacred lies outside and beyond both the individual organism and the collective carriers of vitality. It is often asserted that these are sacred because they are infused or touched by, or generated by, transcendent sacred powers. My own view is that the transcendent sacred is a construction which the human mind itself has adduced, to account for and to place in a necessary order the primordial experience of the actual embodiment of vitality to which it attributes sacredness. The transcendent sacred is valued because to it are imputed the powers which are thought to have generated, which maintain, enhance, and protect, human vitality. The ultimate laws which govern human vitality and its manifestationswhether they be the laws of the physical and organic universe disclosed by scientific research, whether they be the properties of divinity disclosed by revelation, the study of sacred books and theological analysis, or the laws of society disclosed and promulgated by research, reason, and authoritypossess their property of sacredness or sanctity because they are believed to govern, underlie, account for, guide, and control human vitality. They possess sanctity, or rather have it attributed to them, because they explain why lifeand the universe which is its frame and ground, and society which enfolds and contains itexists and because they control its movement, whether they do so through the laws of the universe of physical and organic nature or in the form of the laws of society in general or of a particular society. If man did not prize his own vitality, the sacred and its vast symbolic elaboration into cosmogonies and theologies would not exist It has been created and has held dominion over so many human beings through much of the course of history because of the need to place in an order of power and justice the vicissitudes of human vitality. If life were not viewed and experienced as sacred, then nothing else could be sacred. This is true of societies which are regarded as increasingly secular as well as of those which for their entire history have lived with a powerful admixture of traditional religious belief and practice.

human beings destroy life, and condone its destruction? Why are they so apparently indifferent to the lives of their fellow men? Rulers until well into modern times in most parts of the world, and even now in many, have been and are largely indifferent to the vita! condition of their subjects and countrymen. Generals have often thrown away the lives of large numbers of their soldiers. Churches and states have persecuted and destroyed lives. Governmental authorities have destroyed those who have, in fact or symbolically, endangered the political and social order. Often those whodeny the sanctity of particular individual lives do so on behalf of institutions which they themselves regard as sacred. The incumbents of the institutional roles to which sacredness is attributed, moreover, frequently regard their own sanctity as having overriding rights vis-a-vis other claimants to sanctity. States and churches which regard themselves as possessing sanctity do not find it difficult to disregard or deny the sanctity of the lives of particular individuals, while believing themselves still committed to the sanctity of life as such. But it is not just the custodians of collective sanctity who infringe on the sanctity of individual lives. Murders by private citizens are common, to say the least; multitudes are killed inadvertently by careless or incompetent motorcar drivers; human lives are abbreviated by man-made pollution of the air. Violent hatred and sheer indifference show that the sense of the sanctity of life is often faint and feeble. It is clear that the sense of the sanctity of individual life is not in exclusive possession of the field of forces which control human life. Nonetheless, the occurrence of war, murder, capital punishment, torture, and indifference to human suffering no more invalidates the hypothesis of the widespread affirmation of the sanctity of life than the fact of suicide annuls the proposition of the near universality of the individual's appreciation of his own vitality and its continuance. The real problem is how to explain the coexistence of these two contradictory tendencies.

If human beings attribute sacredness to human life, why do so many

Sensitivity to the sacred is unequally distributed among the members of any given society. It is also intermittent in its operation and of uneven intensity in the extent to which it attributes sacredness to different individuals and collectivities. Some lives are regarded as more sacred than other lives. (This is true both with respect to the sanctity of the vitality of the individual and to the various forms and symbols of transcendent powers in which the sacredness of life is objectified.) There is a gradation of "sanctification," moving from the individual outwardfirst through his kinship and affectional attachments, then local, national, class, ethnic group, and culture, becoming more attenuated and patchier as it reaches into other countries, continents, and races. Just as the personal affections diminish as they radiate outward, so the sense of identity constituted by a

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sense of shared sanctity also diminishesalthough it has far greater radiative capacity than personal affection. Is there a point of disjunction in the downward curve of attribution of sanctity? There seems to be such a point where it is thought that primordial or genetic affinity ends or becomes very thin. There is less concern for the lives of those outside the presumptive genetic network of which we regard ourselves as parts. Tribe, caste, ethnic group, nationality, and the national statethe boundaries of these groups are the points of disjunction, beyond which human life is less sacred than it is within. Yet much destruction of life takes place within primordial groups and in civil communities. Members of families are cruel to each other, and a substantial proportion of all murders occurs within families. There is in fact no situation in which the acknowledgment of the sanctity of life is guaranteed. Indeed, in the very fact of its sanctity lies some part of the danger to which it is exposed. Sanctity calls forth sacrilegious dispositions. The affirmation of vitality arouses an impulse to destroy it. (Conversely, the awareness of these destructive, desecrating impulses calls forth a protective reaffirmation of the sanctity of life, and one which is indeed often fused with destructive impulses of its ownas in the case of capital punishment for murder and treason.) Detachment, the absence of a sense of affinity, makes injury and destruction easieralthough there is a total sense of disaffinity only at the psychopathological margins. Thus in most cases of destruction there is probably some element of a sense of affinity, and some sense of the sacredness of life, which is overpowered by fear and hatred and sacrilegious impulses.

VI All that I have been saying so far is descriptive. The question still remains: is human life really sacred? My answer is that it is, self-evidently. Its sacredness is a primary experience, and the fact that many human beings act contrarily, or do not apprehend it, does not change it. The fact that many people tell lies, and the fact that scientific truths cannot be appreciated except by those who have been trained to appreciate them, do not make scientific propositions any less truthful nor do they abolish the intrinsic value of scientific truth. But even if my affirmation is accepted, our problems are still far from solution. The proposition that life is sacred is no more than a guiding principle. The forms of human life that are sacred are so variegated, so often in tension with each other, and so resistant to being placed on a clear-cut scale of degrees of sacredness, that infinitely difficult problems still remain in deciding what is permissible or intolerable. It is in order, therefore, to begin to examine some of the major modes of

contrived intervention in the light of the guiding principle and to see where this procedure will bring us. I should state at the outset of this stage of the discussion that, although I am not an enthusiast for contrived intervention, and in fact am distrustful of those who envisage an entirely new and wholly better humanity in consequence of the development of the life sciences and certain types of biomedical and other technologies, I do not regard the problem, at least as it appears at present, as really very worrying. To begin at the simplest levels, we have always accepted the surgery which excises a diseased and dispensable organ, such as a gall bladder or even a lung. We have always accepted the surgery which replaced a nonfunctioning or diseased part of the body by an artificial substitute such as a false tooth or a wooden leg. Does the introduction of a plastic aorta represent a qualitative change from a porcelain tooth? Is it more of a deformation of individuality? Clearly not Blood transfusions too have been accepted, even though they go further than the other types of surgery by the introduction of substances from the body of another human being. This would appear to verge on the infringement of individuality. But the fact is that the introduction of blood or a kidney from another human being, living or dead, works, to the extent that it works at all, only if the organism asserts its systemic coherence and integrates the foreign element into itself. A kidney and blood are alien substances, but the organism remains an organism and assimilates them into its biological system or individuality. Hence, I do not think that the vitality of the individual human organism is infringed by such interventions. The organism as a whole retains its coherence and its continuity, and its vitality is in fact extended and reinvigorated. Surgical technology as it is working today, or is likely to work in the future, does not infringe on the sanctity of life. Rather the opposite: it affirms the sanctity of life by extending and enhancing vitality, and it offers no affront to individuality. It raises no moral problems beyond those which medical practice has always had to face.' Since such "reconstructions" are not undertaken without the consent of the patient or the responsible members of his or her family, ethically and logically the situation is the same here as in all medical treatment. The physician is the expert who proposes courses of action, but it is not within his powersgiven the traditional pattern of medical belief and practice

1. Of course these technological operations which require extremely scarce skills and resources almost always require decisions with' moral overtones as to whether they should be undertaken and on whom among the possible beneficiaries. And this does place a responsibility for a decision on a physician or surgeon, just as the choice of men to be sent out on a dangerous patrol involves an officer in a moral choice as to whose life should be preserved and whose should be endangered or destroyed. The affirmation of the sanctity of life as such does not remove moral dilemmas given the diversity of the forms of life, the existence of other values, and the ineluctible fact of scarcity.

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to impose a given course of action indifferently to the will and assent of the patient or his legitimate custodian. Additional considerations arise when we come to artifical insemination (AID), artificial inovulation, and "genetic engineering." "Genetic engineering" and artificial human inovulation are at present only prospects, and the former is not even a near one: they are not yet real issues. It is, however, appropriate to discuss them at this point because they are at the center of the apprehensions which are aroused by other forms of contrived intervention. They affect not the vitality of the living human being but rather the process of procreation and the continuity of the lineage. AID does, and artificial inovulation and genetic engineering would, intrude into and disrupt the lineage; they provide a "descendant" who is not in a direct genetic line with his ancestors. Of course there have always been variant forms of adoption which introduced a genetically alien element into the lineage, but they have been marginal or superficial in the depth of their entry into the process. The new or prospective forms of intervention penetrate into the center of the process, and they therewith affront the primordial sentiment of the sacredness of the stream of life passed down through membership in a common physiological substance. They create a human being who lacks the genetic continuity with the line of descent of those who take him or her as a child!.2 The genetic manipulator or the artificial inseminator or inovulator is not a member of the lineage; like the organism he helps into existence he too stands outside the stream of primordial continuity. His motives might be sacrilegious; they might with equal likelihood be benevolent, or he might be profoundly neutral, concerned only with the efficient performance of an assigned and accepted task. But unless it becomes possible to produce a foetus and bring it to human life outside a human uterus, the process cannot be carried out without the consent of the woman who is to bear the child. The situation is therefore identical in this respect to the situation which obtains traditionally between patient and physician. The physician does not do what the patient does not agree to allow him to do.' It is true that the sanctity of the lineage, which is derivative from the sanctity of life, is infringed by these procedures.

VII Yet I do not think that the matter must be taken too tragically. Like 2. It is impossible for me to say whether this lack of a sense of a genetic continuity with "parents" would result in damage to the individuals who would be or are created by this process. The attitudes of adopted children to the discovery of the fact that their "parents" are not really their parents should be studied. 3. The problem is somewhat complicated by whether the husband knows and consents to the artificial insemination or inovulation. But whatever the laws of adultery, they take a stand on problems of identical character.

religious sensitivity, the sense of the sacredness of lineage is unevenly distributed among human beings. Most human beings possess it, some to a very high degree and others only slightly. Some persons even react against it violently. There are certainly numerous parents who do not care about their children. There are numerous children who do not care about their parents. There are numerous human beings who do not care about their ancestry. For them, what to many of us appears to be an act of impiety, is utterly neutral. There is no reason why they should not be permitted to act on the basis of this "lineage neutrality." One of the great developments of modern society, and one which many people thinkquite rightlyrepresents a tremendous step forward in human progress, has been the diminution in the weight attributed to lineage as a criterion by which to estimate the value of a human being. The decline in aristocracy, the shrinkage of the realm and power of hereditary monarchy, are expressions of the decline of the importance attributed to lineage. The heightened appreciation of individuality, the enhanced evaluation of individual achievement, the growth of civilitythe high evaluation of the individual's membership in the civil community and of his rights as an individual which come from living under a common authority in a contiguous and bounded territorythe idea of the "career open to talents" and of the corresponding principle of equality of individual opportunity, all attest to the attenuation of "lineage consciousness" in the advanced societies of modern times. We are living in an epoch in which the gravitational center of the sanctity of life has been displaced from the lineage of genetically linked individual lives to the individuality of discrete human organisms. I do not think that we can have it both ways, and, of the two, I myself value more highly the emphasis which has become predominant in the modern age. Furthermore, I doubt whether any artificial inovulation will be practiced on a large scale. It seems very unlikely that the sense of the sanctity of lineage will die out to such an extent that very large numbers of men and women would wish to resort to contrived intervention to provide them with offspring. But there will surely be some who, like those who adopt children, will be willing to have children who are not of their own genetic line. Hence, once it becomes possible, it will surely occur. If it is to occur, it is most important that it should be done under morally legitimate auspices, for good reasons and with the agreement of the "parents" who agree irrevocably to treat the product as their own legitimate offspring with full rights as such and with the fullest protection of the law. The same may be said of "genetic engineering," if and when that becomes possible. If mature adults, who wish to reduce the probability of the occurrence of clearly hereditary physical and mental defects in their offspring and descendants, seek the aid of a "genetic engineer" to attain

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this end, I see no more objection to it than I see to the recourse of afflicted persons to the more conventional types of medical therapy. Their respect for the past of their lineage should be balanced by a concern for its future and for the vital quality of the individual members of its temporal extension. Once more we see that the sanctity of human life is an equivocal criterion. The value which it prizes takes a variety of forms, not all of which are in all ways harmonious with each other. Observance of the sacredness of the lineage is not to be coercively imposed any more than observance of the ritual of any particular religion. If there are persons whose feelings about the sacredness of the lineage are not intense, and they have good reasons such as concern for the health of their prospective offspring, there are no grounds for denying them the right to discontinue certain components of their genetic line. "Genetic engineering" will probably not involve a complete break with the line. After all, it is not illegal, even if it is not "natural," to remain celibate and to bring one's lineage to extinction; there should correspondingly be no legal or moral grounds for denying persons the right to disaffiliate their offspring, partially or wholly, from their lineage. As in regular medical and surgical practice, the protection of morally legitimate auspices, good reasons, and a completely voluntary decision on the part of the persons immediately involved must be observed. As regards the sanctity of life itself, the biological-technological innovations we have been considering do not diminish life. They improve it; they do not restrict it, rather they enlarge it as far as individual human beings are concerned. It is certainly true that they would intervene, prospectively, at points where it was-^and still isimpossible to intervene. But except for the disruption of lineage, they do nothing other than increase and enlarge the vitality of oncoming generations. Conceivably they could do worse. They might produce a new species of monsters, less intelligent and more destructive than the present species. They might engender a species more sickly, more subject to ailments of every kind, unviable and unworthy. There is fear that they might, but I do not regard this fear as well founded. Pharmacists could poison the human race; conspiracies of physicians and pharmacists could, even with their present technology, do extraordinary harm to humanity. Surgeons could do the same. At present they do not, and' do not intend to do so. Why do they not exploit their present powers? The answer seems almost self-evident. They stand in reverence of life. They are horrified by the possibility of destruction: or they would be horrified if they thought of the possibilities. Of course there could be the "mad physicians" whom science fiction brings before us, and there have been the wicked and sadistic physicians who conducted "experiments" in the Nazi concentration camps. There is however no reason to expect these cases to become uncontrollably frequent as long as a civil society endures, as long as the

civil authorities are reasonably humane and human, and as long as the present ethical traditions of the medical and scientific professions endure. It is possible, of course, that greater potentialities for evil will prove more tempting than the present more limited potentialities. It is also possible that medical education, because of the greatly increased numbers with which it will have to deal in the future, will be less successful than it is now in training into the new members of the profession that ethos which at present sustains the general appreciation of the sanctity of life. What about the possibility of certain medically unqualified scientists evading the controls which might be quite effective in the medical profession itself? On this point I see no reason why the law should not be able to proceed against these persons as it proceeds now against those who practice medicine without the necessary qualifications, or who, having the qualifications, behave in a clearly unethical and professionally pernicious manner.

VIII Thus far we have discussed the prolongation or "creation" of life. But what about its annihilation through abortion and euthanasia? Are such actions morally permissible from a standpoint which regards life as sacred? I have little doubt about the former; considerable doubt about the latter. My reasons are as follows. The postulate of the sanctity of life refers to three forms of life: (1) the life of the lineage; (2) the life of the human organism; and (3) the life of the individual human being, i.e., the individuality constituted by self-consciousness as a discrete entity possessing self-consciousness, and the capacity for psychic "self-locomotion" (capacity for perception, the amalgamation and ordering of perceptions, memory, imagination, intentions, and choice). A foetus, for some of the period of gestation, does not qualify for the sanctity which is attributed to life. It is still organically part of the mother; it has still not begun to learn, and by virtue of that it has not yet begun on the path to individuality. It is not yet an individual lifeit is part of the life of the mother. It is not, it is true, a part in the same way as a limb or an internal organ are parts of a living human organism, but it also is not yet a discrete, separate human organism beginning to remember, to discriminate, to intend. An infant is on the path to the development of individuality, which is more than biological uniqueness. A foetus is at a much earlier stage on the path on which actual birth is the decisive turning. There are many very good reasons to regret abortion or the necessity for iteffective contraception would be much more satisfactorybut I

232 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus think that for our purposes it should be said that the principle of the sanctity of life of the individual as an individual, or the life of the lineage as the lineage of separate organisms, is not infringed or affronted by abortion in the earlier stages of pregnancy. When we come to euthanasia of monsters or extreme idiots, the matter seems to me to be much more difficult, because in the first place we are dealing with separate discrete human organisms which might possess some modicum of individuality. If we affirm the principle of the sanctity of life, euthanasia in marginal cases, and even in the extreme cases, of idiocy or monstrosity is repugnant. I am reluctant to see it embodied in laws which authorize it, but I would have much sympathy for a flexible attitude in the courts toward members of the family who have acted out of understandable desperation. At the other end of the life span, where there is a certainly dying person in great pain, with not even the slightest probability of recovery, and where individuality has ceased totally to exist, euthanasia is again repugnant. It might, however, be morally permissible. In some respects the fact of scarcity of medical resources permits a solution which approximates, but is not identical with, euthanasia: namely, suspension of effort to keep the organism alive. The argument against the authorization of euthanasia seems to me to rest less in the nature of the action itself and more in the deficiencies of our knowledge in assessing the absence or cessation of individualityitself so ambiguous as to defy clear definitionand in our distrust of the wisdom and generosity of men. IX The sanctity of individuality is a variant form of the sanctity of life. The ambiguities of the ideas of individuality and "normality" or "naturalness" hamper our judgment when we consider another form of "contrived intervention" and when we attempt to give justice to the abhorrence which many persons experience when confronted with certain developments in psychiatric, neurosurgical, and psychological technology. At the same time, the aversion against the taking of narcotics, the administration of hallucinogenic drugs, the use of devices for stimulating subliminal perception and for secretly observing and recording occurrences in the private sphere, seems to me an aversion against the infringement on individuality. It arises from an anxiety lest the individual be made into something other than he "is." It is a fear that the particular individuated and differentiated current of life which exists in the individual human organism will be tampered with, damaged, or extinguished. It is not that the individuality of particular individual human beings is always taken as given and final and is not regarded as subject to certain legitimate, although not always effective, modes of influence. The guidance and formation of character through education
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domestic discipline, the depressive and stunting effects of poverty and maltreatment, and the transformation of sensibility and mental powers through alcohol and sedative drugs are all widely, although unequally, accepted. The stimulation of the imagination through literature and drama are accepted but not the pharmacological stimulation of the imagination; the deadening of impulse through poverty and loneliness are also acceptedalthough decreasingly sobut not the deadening of sensibility through narcotics. The heightening of the power of the senses of vision, touch, taste, through training are accepted but not their heightening through drugs. Some of these acceptances are functions of the compellingness of the inevitable or at least of the apparently unchangeable. Some of the acceptance is also a function of insensitivity, of an insufficient sympathy with the state of mind of others. But it is alsoand this is the most relevant point for our discussiona function of a conception of "normality." It is the product of a metaphysical belief in a preestablished and inviolable pattern of individuality which may coexist with certain externally introduced influences but not with others. Those with which coexistence is not possible are the deliberate ones, those which are contrived and which do not arise from the course of "normal" interaction. It is the elements of deliberation and intention beyond a "normal" range which render abhorrent the administration of drugs to the self or the manipulation of conduct by experimental means not understood by the participant-subject of the experiment. The concept of "normality" presupposes an "essential form" in which individuality exists. Slow and imperceptible processes of change or influence are not regarded as repugnant to this conception of normality because they are not seen as "abnormal" or "unnatural" and because they do not obviously impinge on individuality. Changing oneself deliberately by the exertion of internal moral resources, or by the adduction of certain external allegedly "sacred" influences of moral and religious guidance, is all right. The anonymous influence of one's class on one's moral and cultural attitudes is also regarded as all right; religious conversion is all right. They are regarded as all right because they take place in a medium of an "essential form" of human interaction, in friendship, in work, in worship, etc., which is taken as given. Much of the content of this "essential form" may be accounted for by the statistical frequency and consequent conventional normativeness of the practices in question. But the frequency and conventionality might themselves be to some extent a function of their possession of the property of "essential form." They occur frequently because they are thought to be "normal." This "essential form" or "normality" is very vaguely conceived, and it permits a fairly wide range of acceptable variation. But one of the things it excludes is the absolutely complete dominion of one human being over another human being. And by complete dominion is meant the loss or renunciation of all individual autonomy by the dominated person. Autonomy, thus under-

T 234 Charisma, Ritual, and Consensus The Sanctity ofLife 235 stood, is what the individual would be if left alone, as he is by his kinship group, his working colleagues, his neighbors, and his rulers. There is often not much of him left over after this, but what is left over is his temperament and his memory of his own individual past. When these are taken away from him by "contrived intervention," or even by his cooperation, other persons who do not participate in the complete dominion experience a sensation of abhorrence. they do develop more fully and more effectively, the temptations which they will offer to those in whom the sense of the sanctity of human life and of human individuality is weak or perverted, will be strongsundoubtedly stronger than they are now. The situation will surely not be made easier by the ambiguity and the inherent tensions and contradictions of the idea of the sanctity of life. By its very structure this fundamental moral principle cannot provide an absolutely unambiguous guide which will indicate infallibly what is permissible and what is not permissible in any particular case. Nonetheless, it is the only ultimate foundation for the protection against sadism in its more crude and brutal forms or in the more refined form of "scientific curiosity." For those who accept the traditional Christian view of man and its theological postulates, there is no difficulty in the way of their affirmation of the sanctity of life, although its application will of course often present them with dilemmas which are inherent in the idea itself. For those who no longer accept the traditional Christian view, the acceptance of the idea of the sanctity of life might well encounter intellectual obstacles. I myself find no such obstacles, and I do not think that there are any such in the conception of sanctity which I have put forward here. From my point of view, the task of our generation and those immediately following is not primarily the reestablishment of a Christianity which is shorn of its historical and mythological accretions. It is rather the rediscovery of that which for so long gave such persuasive power to Christianity. It is the protoreligion, the "natural metaphysic" of the sanctity of life, which must be rehabilitated.

Under what conditions is the modification of temperament and individuality by "contrived intervention" permissible? It is certainly not permissible as a satisfaction of the curiosity of psychologists who wish to see how far the personality is modifiable by pharmaceutical or neurosurgical means. It is obviously not permissible for political purposes such as the maintenance of public order or for the protection of the unchallenged dominion of the rulers of society or any particular organization within society. Is it permissible for therapeutic ends? I see no argument against this as long as the usual safeguards practiced by the medical profession are observed, that is, as long as the informed consent of the patient, or of his kinsmen who are morally responsible for him, is given. Where an individual has already lost such individuality as he once possessed, and where the therapeutic technique offers a reasonable probability of the restoration to him of some part of his previous individuality, it seems to me to be morally unexceptionable. The protection which the sanctity of individuality must possess depends in part on the strength of the ethics of the medical profession and on the formation of a comparable ethical outlook among psychologists. It thus depends on the moral vigilance and responsibility of the universities and particularly of those who are in charge of training in medicine, psychology, sociology, and social work. It depends also on the vigilance of legislators and the courts in the implementation of strict prohibition on attempts to modify individuality by persons without adequate professional qualifications. It depends also on the moral alertness of professional bodies. Finally, it depends on public opinion.

XI This brief examination of the range and limits of what is permissible in "contrived intervention" brings us back to where we began. Without a widespread affirmation of the sanctity of life, and of the variant forms of the sanctity of life such as the sanctity of individuality, as a basic and guiding principle of social life, we will be hopelessly adrift. The crisis is not yet fully upon us because the techniques of "contrived intervention" are not yet as elaborate or as secure as they are likely to be in the future. When