Page 137 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

II4 Communication and Evolution of Society

to universality, was to remain imperceptible and not lead to
significant discrepancies.
Such discrepancies turned up again and again in the ancient
empires; but only with the transition to the modern world did
they become unavoidable. The capitalist principle of organization
meant the differentiation of a depoliticized and market-regulated
economic system. This domain of decentralized individual dect-
sions was organized on universalistic principles in the framework
of bourgeois civil law. It was thereby supposed that the private,
autonomous, legal subjects pursued their interests in this morally
neutralized domain of intercourse in a purposive-rational manner,
in accord with general maxims.?®> From this conversion of the
productive sphere to universalistic orientations there proceeded a
strong structural compulsion for the development of personality
structures that replaced conventional role identity with ego iden-
tity. In fact, emancipated members of bourgeois society, whose
conventional identity had been shattered, could know themselves
as one with their fellow citizens in their character as (a) free
and equal subjects of civil law (the citizen as private commodity
owner), (b) morally free subjects (the citizen as private person),
and (c) politically free subjects (the citizen as democratic citizen
of the state). Thus the collective identity of bourgeois society
developed under the highly abstract viewpoints of legality, moral-
ity, and sovereignty; at least it expressed itself in this way in
modern natural-law constructions and in formalist ethics.
However, these abstract determinations are best suited to the
identity of world citizens, not to that of citizens of a particular
state that has to maintain itself against other states. The modern
state arose in the sixteenth century as a member of a system of
states; the sovereignty of one found its limits in the sovereignty
of all other states; indeed its sovereignty was only constituted in
this system based on reciprocal recognition. Even if the system
could have defined away, as peripheral, the non-European world
with which it was economically involved from the start, it still
could not have represented itself as a universal unity in the style
of a grand empire. This was excluded by the international rela-
tions between the sovereign states—relations based in the final
analysis on the threat of militarv force. Moreover, the modern