Manfred Halpern

The Rate and Costs of Political Development

Capacity to direct the rate and course of change in modern times demands more than adding increments of power, substance, or efficiency. The revolution of moderniza tion is the first revolution of mankind to set a new price upon stability in any system of society—namely, it requires an en during capacity to generate and absorb persistent transforma tion. This era is marked above all by rapidly growing imbal ances in rates of change among crucial social forces. The multiplication of these uncontrolled forces of change is one of the main reasons why the cost of modernization increases as time passes. Ideology can be a major instrument in creating a new political culture. Based upon a theory of social change, such ideology is an explicit framework of means and ends ca pable of stimulating policy-oriented analysis, inspiring action, and constituting the normative and practical touchstone of ac complishments. A discussion of alternative costs of failing and succeeding in modernization leads to the conclusion that for most nations, success will depend on the capacity of interna tional society to deal with system transformations.

Toward Further Modernization of the Study of New Nations

Where are we now in the study of new nations? Three books that are the product of nineteen experienced minds should help to establish our present position. Nation-Building grew out of a panel discussion at the 1962 meeting of the American Political Science Association organized by Karl W. Deutsch. Old Societies and New States reflects the work of the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations at the University of Chicago. New Nations represents the thinking of that British school of social anthropologists who, beginning with Radcliffe-Brown, have been especially interested in problems of process, authority, change, and conflict in society.

Choosing between Ways of Life and Death and between Forms of Democracy: An Archetypal Analysis

Four interrelated developments of the modern age are shaping the personal and political history of people throughout the world. Everywhere ways of life are dying that have long provided secure meaning, purpose, and a sense of justice to the stories and relationships being enacted. Never before have so many people learned to live instead with incoherence as a way of life. Increasingly, as people find incoherence unbearable, they turn to deformation-to fantasies about alternative ways of life that are fundamentally new but also fundamentally worse because they deepen incoherence to the point of psychic and usually also physical death. Transformation-or the persistent creation of fundamentally new as well as fundamentally better relationships-has so far remained about as rare as i t was before the modern age, and exists nowhere as a way of life practiced by an entire society. Since the Renaissance, and especially since the 17th century, there has taken place an historically unique growth in knowledge, productivity, communication, bureaucratic control and organization, accumulation of capital, weaponry, and, among a much larger minority than before, an improved standard of living. But in all politics, and in most personal relationships, this growth has changed only the way we live with incoherence, and has not led to transformation. To grasp the dissolution and re-creation of ways of life, and to understand the problems of democratic participation in the fundamental changes now before us requires an appropriate theoretical formulation. We must try a new form of archetypal analysis. The chief difficulty in understanding archetypal analysis stems from the fact that it deals not only with the concrete and the

Egypt and the New Middle Class: Reaffirmations and New Explorations *

Amos Perlmutters essay attacks the myth of a new middle class seen potentially or now as a cohesive group embodied by the army and capable of modernizing Egypt and the Middle East. He describes me as the principal creator of this myth. In the form and substance in which he presents it, the myth is his, not mine. Those who have already read The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton, 1963) in which I first published some hypotheses on the relationship between social classes and modernization, or who missed Perlmutters false image of it, need not read Part I of this response. Those neither bemused nor amused by distortions and their resolutions may wish to skip to Part II. There I try to add a few suggestions to my 1963 work by responding to the main question which Perlmutter raises but has done little to answer: why has the salaried new middle class not done well so far in modernizing the Middle East?

Knowing, interconnecting, and fulfilling the four faces and the source of our being.

This essay is part of a work in progress concerned with trying to discover, explain and evaluate the most crucial choices of our life and how to free ourselves to make fundamentally better choices. Our theoretical analysis focuses on the practice of the core drama of life, the archetypal drama of transformation. Why is that our core drama? Because by moving through its three Acts again and again, we free our capacity to participate with the deepest source of our being and with our neighbors in creating fundamentally new and better solutions to concrete problems. The living underlying pattern of this drama is always the same; its concrete experience, always different. It is also the core drama of life because we have only four fundamentally different choices for organizing a way of life in the service of which we live the stories of our lives, a way of life which provides us with ultimate meaning and purpose in life. And three of these four ways of life are only fragments of the core drama of transformation.