Page 148 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

125 The Development of Normative Structures

has overcome the traditional structuralist front against evolution-
ism and that has assimilated motifs of the theory of knowledge
from Kant to Peirce. (Lucien Goldmann very early recognized
the significance of Piaget's work for Marxist theory. )*7
Functionalism followed a path that led beyond the cultural
anthropology of the thirties and forties and again made possible
a connection with the developmental theories of the nineteenth
century. Talcott Parsons’ neoevolutionism applies the conceptual
apparatus of general systems theory to societies and to the struc-
tural change of social systems. Functionalist analysis brings social
evolution under the viewpoint of the heightening of complexity.
In several essays, I have tried to show that this approach comes
up short. Functionalism explains evolutionary advances by corre-
Jating functionally equivalent solutions to system problems. It
thus steers away from the evolutionary learning processes that
could alone have explanatory power. This explanatory gap 1s
quite evident to a past master of functionalism like N. Eisenstadt
—it can be filled with a theory of social movements. If I am
not mistaken, A. Tourraine was the first to introduce this element
systematically into the theory of social evolution.*® Naturally, the
action orientations that achieve dominance in social movements
are, for their part, structured by cultural traditions. If one con-
ceives of social movements as learning processes through which
latently available structures of rationality are transposed into
social practice**—so that in the end they find an institutional
embodiment—there is the further task of identifying the rational-
ization potential of traditions.
Nevertheless, systems theory offers useful instruments for
analyzing the initial conditions of evolutionary innovations,
namely, the appearance of system problems that overload a struc-
turally limited steering capacity and trigger crises that endanger
the system’s continued existence. Claus Offe has shown how
systems-theoretic concepts and hypotheses can be used precisely
for the analysis of crises*°-—at least if one connects systems theory
and action theory. But then we need an equivalent for the rules
of translation that Marx provided (in the form of a theory of
value) for the connection between circulation processes and class
structure, between value relations and power relations.