A Culturalist Theory of Political Change

ness and flexibility will grow with social development. First, the disposition to act "rationally" introduces just the kind of general and flexible culture trait that inherent social fluidity requires. (Durkheim [1960] already associated rational attitudes and behavior with the abstractness of thought necessary in highly developed societies.) The rationalization of modem life-which Weber considered to be its governing trait-thus may be an accommodation to structural conditions rather than, contra Weber, their underlying cause. Second, the obviously difficult problem of finding a proper trade-off between two warring imperatives in modem societies, that of cultural flexibility and that of cultural fixity, is bound to be a practical difficulty, not just a theoretical one. Reconciling fixity with flexibility, abstractness, and formality may be a crucial element in what has widely been perceived as growing malaise in highly modem societies. Anomie will follow not only from lack of internal guides to action but from guidelines too general and loose to serve in the relentless particularity of experience. Highly modem society thus may be intrinsically acultural and, for that reason, transitory or susceptible to surrogates for culture-including cults and dogmas. The expectation of cultural flexibility, finally, should apply to all highly modem societies. It thus pertains to polities initially based on rigid dogma (like communist societies) that have successfully pursued modernization. In such societies, the first expectation, that of cultural inertia, should hold. Old culture should resist new dogma. The expectation of patternmaintaining change (or perceptual distortion) should hold as well. So one should expect also that as culture changes in such societies, it will change toward greater flexibility-and therefore to reinterpreta-