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-
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