Page 145 - Communication and the Evolution of Society
P. 145
122 Communication and Evolution of Society
on the other, new levels of learning that have already been
achieved in world views and are latently available but not yet
incorporated into action systems and thus remain institutionally
inoperative.
System problems express themselves as disturbances of the
reproduction process of a society that is normatively fixed in its
identity. Whether problems arise which overload the adaptive
capacity of a society is a contingent matter; when problems of
this type do arise, the reproduction of the society is placed in
question—unless it takes up the evolutionary challenge and alters
the established form of social integration that limits the employ-
ment and development of resources. Whether this alteration—
which Marx describes as an overthrow of the relations of pro-
duction—is actually possible, and how it is developmental-
logically possible, cannot be read off the system problems; it is
rather a question of access to a new learning level. The solution
to the problems producing the crisis requires (a) attempts to
loosen up the existing form of social integration by embodying
iN new institutions the rationality structures already developed in
world views, and (b) a milieu favorable to the stabilization of
successful attempts. Every economic advance can be characterized
in terms of institutions in which rationality structures of the next
higher stage of development are embodied—for example, the
royal courts of justice, which, early in the development of civil-
ization, permitted administration of justice at the conventional
level of moral consciousness; or the capitalist firm, rational ad-
ministration of the state, and bourgeois norms of civil law, which,
at the beginning of the modern period, organized morally neutral
domains of strategic action according to wniversalistzc principles.
Previously sociologists talked only of an “‘institutionalization of
values,” through which certain value orientations receive binding
force for actors. When I now attempt to grasp evolutionary learn-
ing processes with the aid of the concept of “the institutional
embodiment of structures of rationality,” it is no longer a question
of making orienting contents binding but of opening up structural
possibilities for the rationalization of action.
Looking now at this explanatory strategy (which has proven
itself in Klaus Eder’s investigation of the rise of societies or-