The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order - Couverture rigide

Fukuyama, Francis

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 068484530X ISBN 13 : 9780684845302

Editeur : The Free Press, 1999

Synopsis

Book by Fukuyama Francis

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Chapter 1: Playing by the Rules
After the Industrial Era
Over the past half-century, the United States and other economically advanced countries have gradually made the shift into what has been called an "information society," the "information age," or the "postindustrial era." Futurist Alvin Toffler has labeled this transition the "Third Wave," suggesting that it will ultimately be as consequential as the two previous waves in human history: from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies and then from agricultural to industrial ones.
This shift consists of a number of related elements. In the economy, services increasingly displace manufacturing as a source of wealth. Instead of working in a steel mill or automobile factory, the typical worker in an information society has a job in a bank, software firm, restaurant, university, or social service agency. The role of information and intelligence, embodied in both people and increasingly smart machines, becomes pervasive, and mental labor tends to replace physical labor. Production is globalized as inexpensive information technology makes it increasingly easy to move information across national borders, and rapid communications by television, radio, fax, and e-mail erodes the boundaries of long-established cultural communities.
A society built around information tends to produce more of the two things people value most in a modern democracy: freedom and equality. Freedom of choice has exploded, whether of cable channels, low-cost shopping outlets, or friends met on the Internet. Hierarchies of all sorts, whether political or corporate, come under pressure and begin to crumble. Large, rigid bureaucracies, which sought to control everything in their domain through rules, regulations, and coercion, have been undermined by the shift toward a knowledge-based economy, which serves to "empower" individuals by giving them access to information. Just as rigid corporate bureaucracies like the old IBM and AT&T gave way to smaller, flatter, more participatory competitors, so too did the Soviet Union and East Germany fall apart from their inability to control and harness the knowledge of their own citizens.
The shift into an information society has been celebrated by virtually everyone who has written or talked about it. Commentators as politically diverse as George Gilder, Newt Gingrich, Al Gore, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, and Nicholas Negroponte have seen these changes as good for prosperity, good for democracy and freedom, and good for society in general. Certainly many of the benefits of an information society are clear, but have all of its consequences necessarily been so positive?
People associate the information age with the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, but the shift away from the Industrial era started more than a generation earlier with the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt in the United States and comparable moves away from manufacturing in other industrialized countries. This period, from roughly the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, was also marked by seriously deteriorating social conditions in most of the industrialized world. Crime and social disorder began to rise, making inner-city areas of the wealthiest societies on earth almost uninhabitable. The decline of kinship as a social institution, which has been going on for more than two hundred years, accelerated sharply in the last half of the twentieth century. Fertility in most European countries and Japan fell to such low levels that these societies will depopulate themselves in the next century, absent substantial immigration; marriages and births became fewer; divorce soared; and out-of-wedlock childbearing came to affect one out of every three children born in the United States and over half of all children in Scandinavia. Finally, trust and confidence in institutions went into a deep, forty-year decline. A majority of people in the United States and Europe expressed confidence in their governments and fellow citizens during the late 1950s; only a small minority did so by the early 1990s. The nature of people's involvement with one another changed as well. Although there is no evidence that people associated with each other less, their mutual ties tended to be less permanent, less engaged, and with smaller groups of people.
These changes were dramatic, they occurred over a wide range of similar countries, and they all appeared at roughly the same period in history. As such, they constituted a Great Disruption in the social values that prevailed in the industrial age society of the mid-twentieth century, and are the subject of Part One of this book. It is highly unusual for social indicators to move together so rapidly; even without knowing why they did so, we have reason to suspect that they might be related to one another. Although conservatives like William J. Bennett are often attacked for harping on the theme of moral decline, they are essentially correct: the breakdown of social order is not a matter of nostalgia, poor memory, or ignorance about the hypocrisies of earlier ages. The decline is readily measurable in statistics on crime, fatherless children, reduced educational outcomes and opportunities, broken trust, and the like.
Was it just an accident that these negative social trends, which together reflected weakening social bonds and common values holding people together in Western societies, occurred just as economies in those societies were making the transition from the industrial to the information era? The hypothesis of this book is that the two were in fact intimately connected, and that with all of the blessings that flow from a more complex, information-based economy, certain bad things also happened to our social and moral life. The connections were technological, economic, and cultural. The changing nature of work tended to substitute mental for physical labor, thereby propelling millions of women into the workplace and undermining the traditional understandings on which the family had been based. Innovations in medical technology like the birth control pill and increasing longevity diminished the role of reproduction and family in people's lives. And the culture of intensive individualism, which in the marketplace and laboratory leads to innovation and growth, spilled over into the realm of social norms, where it corroded virtually all forms of authority and weakened the bonds holding families, neighborhoods, and nations together. The complete story is, of course, much more complex than this, and differs from one country to another. But broadly speaking, the technological change that brings about what economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction" in the marketplace caused similar disruption in the world of social relationships. It would be surprising were this not true.
But there is a bright side too: social order, once disrupted, tends to get remade once again, and there are many indications that this is happening today. We can expect this to happen for a simple reason: human beings are by nature social creatures, whose most basic drives and instincts lead them to create moral rules that bind themselves together into communities. They are also by nature rational, and their rationality allows them to create ways of cooperating with one another spontaneously. Religion, often helpful to this process, is not the sine qua non of social order, as many conservatives believe. Neither is a strong and expansive state, as many on the Left argue. Man's natural state is not the war of "every one against every one" that Thomas Hobbes envisioned, but rather a civil society made orderly by the presence of a host of moral rules. These statements, moreover, are empirically supported by a tremendous amount of recent research coming out of the life sciences, in fields as diverse as neurophysiology, behavioral genetics, evolutionary biology, and ethology, as well as biologically informed approaches to psychology and anthropology. The study of how order arises, not as the result of a top-down mandate by hierarchical authority, whether political or religious, but as the result of self-organization on the part of decentralized individuals, is one of the most interesting and important intellectual developments of our time. Thus Part Two of this book steps back from the immediate social issues raised by the Great Disruption and asks the more general questions, Where does social order come from in the first place, and how does it evolve under changing circumstances?
The idea that social order has to come from a centralized, rational, bureaucratic hierarchy was one very much associated with the industrial age. The sociologist Max Weber, observing nineteenth-century industrial society, argued that rational bureaucracy was in fact the very essence of modern life. We know now, however, that in an information society, neither governments nor corporations will rely exclusively on formal, bureaucratic rules to organize the people over whom they have authority. Instead, they will have to decentralize and devolve power, and rely on the people over whom they have nominal authority to be self-organizing. The precondition for such self-organization is internalized rules and norms of behavior, which suggests that the world of the twenty-first century will depend heavily on such informal norms. Thus, while the transition into an information society has disrupted social norms, a modern, high-tech society cannot get along without them and will face considerable incentives to produce them.
Part Three of the book looks both backward and forward for the sources of this order. The view that society's moral order has been in long-term decline is one long held by certain conservatives. The British statesman Edmund Burke argued that the Enlightenment itself, with its project of replacing tradition and religion with reason, is the ultimate source of the problem, and Burke's contemporary heirs continue to argue that secular humanism is at the root of today's social problems. But while conservatives may be right that there were important ways in which moral behavior deteriorated in the past two generations, they tend to ignore the fact that social order not only declines, but also increases in long cycles. This happened in Britain and America during the nineteenth century. It is reasonably clear that the period from the end of the eighteenth century until approximately the middle of the nineteenth century was one of sharply increasing moral decay in both countries. Crime rates in virtually all major cities increased; families broke down and illegitimacy rates rose; people were socially isolated; alcohol consumption, particularly in the United States, exploded, with per capita consumption in 1830 at levels perhaps three times as great as they are today. But then, with each passing decade from the middle of the century until its end, virtually each one of these social indicators turned positive: crime fell; families began staying together in greater numbers; drunkards went on the wagon; and new voluntary associations sprouted up to give people a greater sense of communal belonging.
There are similar signs today that the Great Disruption that took place from the 1960s to the 1990s is beginning to recede. Crime is down sharply in the United States and other countries where it had become epidemic. Divorce rates have declined since the 1980s, and there are now signs that the rate of illegitimacy (in the United States, at any rate) has begun to level off, if not fall. Levels of trust in major institutions have improved during the 1990s, and civil society appears to be flourishing. There is, moreover, plenty of anecdotal evidence that more conservative social norms have made a comeback, and that the more extreme forms of individualism that appeared during the 1970s have fallen out of favor. It is far too early to assert that these problems are now behind us. But it is also wrong to conclude that we are incapable of adapting socially to the technological and economic conditions of an age of information.

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, One More Time
The disruption of social order by the progress of technology is not a new phenomenon. Particularly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, human societies have been subject to a relentless process of modernization as one new production process replaced another. The social disorder of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in America and Britain can be traced directly to the disruptive effects of the so-called first Industrial Revolution, when steam power and mechanization created new industries in textiles, railroads, and the like. Agricultural societies were transformed into urban industrial societies within the space of perhaps a hundred years, and all of the accumulated social norms, habits, and customs that had characterized rural or village life were replaced by the rhythms of the factory and city.
This shift in norms engendered what is perhaps the most famous concept in modern sociology, the distinction drawn by Ferdinand Tönnies between what he called gemeinschaft("community") and gesellschaft("society"). According to Tönnies, the gemeinschaft that characterized a typical premodern European peasant society consisted of a dense network of personal relationships based heavily on kinship and on the direct, face-to-face contact that occurs in a small, closed village. Norms were largely unwritten, and individuals were bound to one another in a web of mutual interdependence that touched all aspects of life, from family to work to the few leisure activities that such societies enjoyed. Gesellschaft, on the other hand, was the framework of laws and other formal regulations that characterized large, urban, industrial societies. Social relationships were more formalized and impersonal; individuals did not depend on one another for mutual support to nearly the same extent and were therefore much less morally obligated.
The idea that informal norms and values will be replaced over time by rational, formal laws and rules has been a mainstay of modern sociological theory ever since. The English legal theorist Sir Henry Maine argued that in premodern societies, people were tied to one another by what he called a "status" relationship. A father was bound to his family or a lord to his slaves and servants in a lifetime personal relationship that consisted of a host of informal, unarticulated, and often ambiguous mutual obligations. No one could simply walk away from the relationship if he or she didn't like it. In a modern capitalist society, by contrast, Maine argued that such relationships are based on "contract," for example, a formal agreement that an employee will provide a certain quantity of labor in return for a certain quantity of wages from the employer. Everything is spelled out in the wage contract and is therefore enforceable by the state; there are no age-old obligations or duties that accompany the exchange of money for services. Unlike a status relationship, in other words, the contract relationship is not a moral one: either party can break it at any time, provided the terms of the contract are fulfilled.
The consequences of the shift from agricultural to industrial societies on social norms were so large that they gave birth to an entirely new academic discipline, sociology, which sought to describe and understand these changes. Virtually all of the great social thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century -- including Tönnies, Maine, Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Georg Simmel -- devoted their careers to explicating the nature of this transition. Indeed, the American sociologist Robert Nisbet once characterized the entire subsequent thrust of his discipline as one long commentary on gemeinschaft and gesellschaft.
Man...

Revue de presse :

Virginia Postrel Los Angeles Times Innovative...engaging....Fukuyama provides a lucid course in "one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century."

Anthony Gottlieb The New York Times Book Review Francis Fukuyama is an analyst who does not, intellectually speaking, get out of bed for anything less than the all-encompassing grand sweep of history....His new book, The Great Disruption, tackles social and moral development on the same grand scale as his earlier work.

Alan Ehrenhalt The Wall Street Journal One of the ways we learn about dramatic social change in the 1990s is that Francis Fukuyama shows up to tell us it is happening....He asks large questions; and he changes the agenda of public debate. We are still talking about The End of History. I imagine we will be talking about The Great Disruption for quite a while.

Michael Kazin The Washington Post Book World Fukuyama is one of the few American intellectuals of any ideological bent capable of training a knowledge of world history and a grasp of social theory on topics of undeniable contemporary significance.

Walter Kirn New York Magazine Fukuyama is no alarmist -- he's too cool for that, too academic and wedded to the sociological long view -- but now and then he spins a nightmare scenario....Fukuyama draws on a dozen disciplines, from game theory to genetics, to make his case that stable states arise naturally from chaotic interludes the way Sunday morning follows Saturday night.

Linda Chavez The Washington Times With another presidential campaign gearing up -- and the inevitable discussion of family values that each election brings -- The Great Disruption ought to be required reading among both parties' candidates.

Howard Gleckman Business Week Agree with him or not, Fukuyama makes a challenging case.

George Scialabba The Boston Globe [Fukuyama] has made out a great deal in this book and his previous books, and will undoubtedly teach us a great deal more. Three seminal books in a mere seven years. What next?

Charles Murray Commentary The Great Disruption takes on questions that go to the heart of social policy writ large. It is written with never-failing lucidity, brings together vast and disparate literatures, and makes one think in new ways about the prospects of post-industrial society. That is quite enough for one book.

Andrew Ferguson The Weekly Standard The Great Disruption is a learned and impressive work, ranging easily across disciplines, combining fact and argument in subtle and unexpected ways.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: The Free Press
• Date d'édition: 1999
• ISBN 10: 068484530X
• ISBN 13: 9780684845302
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 354