Ambivalence and Social Relations

Abstract

When Lewis Mumford wrote his essay Utopia; the City and the Machine1 he presented an imagery of a social system that has ingenious but implicit antecedents in Max Weber's work on the transformation of charismatic authority.2 Except for some writing of Shils, Goffman, Slater and recently Merton there are all too few propensities in the contemporary sociological literature that go in the same direction.3 Mumford's imagery does not see the social system as a quasi-organism whose chief problem is self-perpetuation; nor as a quasi-market which maximizes the satisfaction of most by setting an ideal price; nor as a set of looking glass selves where everyone sees what everyone else sees. Instead it is a paradoxical, Janus-like social system where the monumental ancient city of the free is built only at the price of the degradation of the slaves, where an accomplishment surpassing any man's imagination grows side by side with the tyranny of fear. In such a system there is never a satisfactory common goal which everyone tries to preserve, nor an ideal price, nor a reciprocity of understanding. Instead we have a closely knit symbiosis of two opposing yet complementary developments which constitute the dilemma of the city which simultaneously becomes and ceases to be a Utopia. It is this phenomenon of ambivalence that I want to call attention to in somewhat more general terms.