The Problem of the Convergence of Industrial Societies: A Critical Look at the State of a Theory

Abstract

Are industrial societies becoming alike? This crucial question, unfortunately sometimes treated as an assumption, has been of central theoretical interest since the appearance of the social sciences. Thephilosophes, with their optimistic belief in progress, were theorists of convergence because they believed in the perfectibility not of particular groups in society, but of all ‘mankind’. It was a radical, anti-relativistic notion to believe that Man not Men was the basic unit of study, the premise for speculation. For if Man acted the same everywhere, then forms of social organization must share essential analytic properties and be proceeding toward an equivalence of structural arrangements. Morally, good was to be found everywhere. Samuel Johnson remarked that ‘the King of Siam sent ambassadors to Louis XIV, but Louis XIV did not send ambassadors to the King of Siam’. But Johnson sent his literary imagination on a diplomatic mission to Abyssinia inRasselas, presumably to clear his mind of such ethnocentric cant. The cult of the Noble Savage was not only an aspect of eighteenth-century Romanticism, but an indication that Europeans, even Frenchmen, had something to learn from the simple lives of their primitive contemporaries. Like thephilosophesmany thought that the state, in the form of the benevolent despot, assured continual improvement, and often saw middling groups of intellectuals as allied with or advisory to the king in this great enterprise. It did not seem improbable that societies would converge to a similar political structure—with a strong state, an intellectual elite, and a matureopinion publique, a phrase that originated in pre-revolutionary eighteenth-century France.