Abstract
Government must, as it always has, manage the external affairs of the collectivity, arbitrate conflicts between interest groups, establish rules according to which individuals may compete, maintain public order, and safeguard the interest of the nation. The originality of industrial societies does not reside in the permanence of a political subsystem, but in the differentiation of the ruling hierarchies. In Western societies the same men do not control public administration and private enterprise; legislators and public officials are for the most part professional politicians. In short, the apparently characteristic order of Western industrial society consists of a dissociation of powers. Temporal authority is shared by business leaders, politicians, popular leaders, and military commanders; spiritual authority by theologians, intellectuals, and ideologues. The primary datum, then, is the plurality of ruling minorities, a plurality that permits objective comparisons of the various regimes.
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