Enlergent Sociology By ERNEST GELLNER the moment the prestige of

sociology is rising. This may be due less to any recent "whieveMents of sociologists than to extraneous (sireo_

[11 uances and the deficiencies of other sub-

Wets. Disciplines U may sometimes rise into prom- 'neace simply because they happen to provide the `'„vas on which the image of man is, at the time most naturally drawn. In the twentieth `IlturY the essence of man is not that he is a r4ti°nal, or a political, or a sinful, or a thinking

"o, but that he is an industrial animal. essence resides in his capacity to contribute to,

and to profit from, industrial society. The • , is embellishments. One part of the world `9"sists of societies which are industrial; the of people whose main characteristic is their rapacity for becoming such. Populations are underdeveloped not because they are worse off !,11"01 they have been: they are such by virtue of the awareness that they might be industrialised. It is implicitly recognised that the basis of flower, the criterion of social arrangements and is the establishment and maintenance of Illci coustrial system. Virtue, salvation, the good k consent, the general will and the like, though "q may survive in textbooks, are no more than Llear-v; car-vacuous labels attached to the criteria of ""w to become industrialised and what to do with 'ill industrial society when one has it. There are 4,)„,

very nearly only two kinds of politics, and

cry'

nearly only two kinds of issue: there

are toe politics of getting industrialised and the Nice s of affluence. There are the issues of just 114 to get there, and the issues of choosing the - 'riteria for disposing of the new powers when one there: the issues of becoming and those of n 6 There is also, admittedly. the issue of how " liberty is possibie at either stage. (This „deed is a concern whose roots may be quite d

'n

„ ePendent. Even so. its relevant formulations '''4v depend on industrialism.)

All

not this is, perhaps. an exaggeration. But it is '00 far removd from what vdry many people about the world they live in. And it supplieS j"e most interesting reason for such popu- 44rit, tas sociology now enjoys: sociology is c ) be the region which contains the ques- Itos that matter most. ,No doubt there are eir eaunstances when salvation and perdition, kno,,,aitA health and disease, order and anarchy, ques"tiledge and its limitations, are the first ; °Ils that spring to mind—and in such e•reu., „ instances theology or psychology or politics s,r philosophy may enjoy a prestige independent the actual merits of its practitioners. The istme Is now true of sociology (and to say this only not to say that its practitioners lack merit- inde that such magic as their words possess is dependent of that merit). A subject may ,-'11 to103rarily become more than just an inquiry al tfield--it can become the repository of the current image of man. Sociology, and in Partk new alar the sociology of industrialisation, has had such a position thrust upon it.

pursuits. 'sociology' covers a multitude of

ace seem Of these, two central ones may

al each to have only a fortuitous connection with other: survey techniques (which could be °Per oeeatted by men who have never thought about of sio Y at large) and speculations about the laws eial development (which may be indulged by men who have no idea how to run a survey). ret II) the light of their common preoccupation with Industrial man, one can see the connection

between the two. Surveys and questionnaires are techniques relevant to the study of reasonably atomised and reasonably articulate populations, characteristic of industrial society. Speculations about development, on the other hand, are primarily reflections on the emergence of those social features now seen to be connected with technical advancement. The question was, fundamentally, how did we come to be so mar- vellous?

By comparison, other subjects have tended to let these questions go by default, either by naïvely treating industrial man as a kind of universal man (thereby proving unable to say anything about his becoming industrial) or by ignoring the relevant characteristics. The main body of economic theory, for instance, tends to take for granted the institutional, psychological and evaluative framework whose conditions of emergence, and final forms, are just what is most problematical. The work of a Myrdal on becom- ing, or of a Galbraith on being, consists in the main of showing that what really matters is that which used to be swept under the carpet of ceteris paribus, or hidden in unquestioned assumptions. Or again, the best-known ethical theory, utilitarianism, has become irrelevant be- cause its basis, human happiness, is something which has to be violated during the process of becoming, which is a variable subject to manipulation. As for classical political theory, its central question—the basis of order as opposed to anarchy—is replaced (despite the Congo) by an interest in the bases of industrial society as opposed to pre-industrial society. It is not the mythical transition from the jungle to social contract which is now of interest, but the observable transition from the politics of the field to the politics of the factory and office. Even the second big question of old political theory, the limitation of power, is in partial abeyance: the proliferating military regimes are judged by the success of their development schemes, rather than condemned out of hand for their failure to conform to the canons of liberal- ism.

It is ironical, however, that at a time when the old questions of politics are dated, some of the theories, and not the best ones at that, find a curious applicability. There is a type of theory which locates a Real Man or Will inside the metaphysical bosom of actual people, and equates both their own fulfilment and the attain- ment of a just social order with the emergence of this incapsulated wonder. The defects of this kind of theory are obvious, yet it abundantly applies to the political life of a very large portion of humanity: it is not the present worldly aims or moral aspirations of tribesmen, peasants and shanty-town dwellers which provide the basis for the political life of their countries; it is the as yet unrealised industrial and affluent man struggling inside each of them to get out.

Again, there is the type of theory which attributes the right to govern to those possessing wisdom. Abstractly formulated, this theory has little appeal in our time, when theories of know- ledge are egalitarian and modest, allowing little scope either for differential wisdom or for a form of insight which would carry a guarantee of political rightness. All the same, this theory also describes the politics of a large area of man- kind. Colonel Mobutu's modified Platonism, rule by Graduate-Student-Kings, is only an unusually explicit version of a principle of govern- ment tacitly recognised by all those in the state of becoming fully human (i.e., industrial). For them a division into two nations, of those who have and those who have not tasted the new wis-

dom, is perhaps deeper than was the se[ of rich and poor in the West.

The real content of these theories is dr3 from sociology. The incapsulated good Plan not Integrated or Blessed or Rational man, to the user of machine tools or office equiPnit the beneficiary of affluent living. The special' possessors of political wisdom are not fh endowed with a metaphysical insight or Grace Reason, but an elite elevated by diplomas I the schools of industrialised societies. It is situation which gives sociology its current opro tunity. What it does with it remains to be sin'