On Church and Sect

Abstract

three kinds of studies here suggested are capable of extension in many directions. For example, the distinction between the medieval political community, the modern nation-state and the crisis of transition is applicable principally to the countries of Western and one should explore the limits of this applicability. But one may also apply an analogous approach to other areas of the world which differ from the Western European pattern, to be sure, but which nonetheless possess common structural characteristics of their own.20 With regard to these characteristics it should be possible to formulate models of the pre-modern social structure, of the transition which followed, and of the modern social structure which has developed to date.2' These are only a few positive illustrations of comparative sociological studies aiming at propositions that are true of more than one but less than all societies. This essay will have served its purpose if it directs attention to a type of inquiry whichat the macro-sociological level-seeks to hold a balance between grand theory and the descriptive accounts of area-studies. contained in R. Bendix and Stein Rokkan, The Extension of National Citizenship to the Lower Classes: A Comparative Perspective, Paper submitted to the Fifth World Congress of Sociology, Washington 1962. 20 Examples are the Latin American countries which have in common the Spanish colonial heritage, European frontier-settlements like the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand which have the British legacy in common, and others. Such groupings are not always that simple and there are countries, like which probably are in a category of their own. Such historical clustering of social structures may then be analyzed with the aid of sociological universals; but I confess to considerable scepticism concerning the use of such universals without regard to such clusters, or in the absence of an attempt to spell out in what respects two or more social structures are alike or different. I have made such an attempt in a comparison of German and Japanese modernization. See Reinhard Bendix, Pre-conditions of Development: A Comparison of Germany and Japan, Conference on Modern Bermuda, 1962. 21 In an effort to articulate the distinguishing features of Western European societies, I have attempted to formulate such models for Russia from her autocratic rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to her totalitarian structure of the postrevolutionary period. See my Work and Authority in Industry, New York: John Wiley, 1956, Chapters 3 and 6 and The Cultural and Political Setting of Economic Rationality in Western and Eastern Europe, in Gregory Grossman (ed.), Value and Plan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960, pp. 245-70.