Changing Consciousness, Values, and Culture in Advanced Industrial Societies

Abstract

The well-organized and well-conceived Fifth International Conference of Eu ropeanists held in Washington, D.C. over the weekend of October 18, 1985, offered a set of wide-ranging panels which in various ways addressed them selves to two connected themes: the search for a third way in Western Europe between a discredited communist orthodoxy and a faltering social democracy, and, finding ways to deepen democracy from social relations to the shop floor to the conduct of national life in the societies of Europe. Panels on class for mation, consciousness, and the state, new social movements, changing work place culture, the social workings of Weimar Social the sexual division of labor in production, and a concluding panel entitled Beyond So cial Democracy, addressed aspects of these themes. In the discussion of class formation, working-class consciousness, and the French state Ira Katznelson (New School for Social Research) reported on a forthcoming collection of essays by various authors on working-class formation which started from the premise that there is no single model of working-class emergence, nor is there any basis for accepting claims of national exception alisms. In a creative piece of cliometric work, Michael Hanagan (Columbia) demonstrated how the changing economic opportunities in agriculture for mi grants from farms to industrial centers in the Stephanois from the 1850s to the 1880s held back or reinforced working-class consciousness. Only when the op portunity to return home and buy a farm had become impossible, could the sense of working-class identification grow. My own paper at this session fo cused on the impact of rising worker consciousness in speeding both the unifi cation and rise to political dominance of the socioeconomic elites of the new Third Republic. Anne Meyering (Michigan State) described the shift in the leadership of local political influence from priests to industrialists in Montlu?on under Napoleon III. Louise Tilly (New School), the discussant, emphasized the need to be sensitive to regional and local variations especially for nineteenth-century France. A discussion of contemporary social movements examined the hypothesis that the new politics will be social and cultural in content rather than oriented around economic values. Margit Mayer (Frankfurt/M) comparing German and United States grassroots movements found that above all they differed po litically. The Greens challenge the legitimacy of the political order, for exam