Patrons of the Poor

Abstract

In industrialized societies no less than in feudal landlord societies there are extreme differences in wealth. There has been no clear trend toward leveling the extremes in those Western industrialized societies in which the private sector of the economy has maintained an important controlling role. Extreme poverty is clearly a persistent accompaniment of industrialization in such societies. The current great concern in the United States with this phenomenon, in the sense of its being conceived as a problem condition to be changed, may or may not be indicative that change is incipient. Fundamental change would of course involve new ideological orientations and new social structure - in short, a different kind of social system. Symptoms of such change are perhaps to be seen in the new orientations embodied in the Economic Opportunity Act and in what has been labeled civil disorder. The legislation proposes new forms of social structure for linking people in poverty areas directly with the national political organization. Civil disorder, too, may be symptomatic of new forms of internal social organization stimulated both by the new legislation and by other conditions.