Page 81 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information Revolutions
In society, as in the economy, industrialization created new problems
of information and communication. Maintaining social bonds with oth-
ers became more difficult. As Durkheim observed in Division of Labor
in Society, industrialization and urbanization stressed and overburdened
old processes of communication and information exchange that were the
basis of social integration and cohesion. Patterns of simple, neighborly
communication and social intercourse that had bound communities to-
gether in the preindustrial era grew increasingly inadequate by the early
years of the twentieth century.
The rise of the city was a central part of this process. In 1880, the small
town was the center of social gravity in the United States, with its small
scale, personal relationships and inward-focused, parochial concerns.
By 1920, some 51 percent of Americans lived in urban areas, with all
that urban life entailed: a large scale of social and political activity, new
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rules and norms, and a larger number of impersonal relationships. The
demographicchangesalsoledinthedirectionofcomplexity.Notonlywas
the population growing in size, from 39 million in 1880 to 123 million in
1930; it was growing much more diverse. From 1901 to 1930, the United
States admitted just under 19 million immigrants – more than half the
Civil War–era population of the entire country. 83
Political scientists recognize in this history the interdependent in-
gredients of the twentieth-century interest-group pluralism that would
eventually flourish in the United States. Traditional explanations of the
linkages between industrialization and the rise of the modern state, how-
ever, typically do not attend sufficiently to information and complexity.
Rather, the traditional account adopts roughly the following causal story.
Changes in economy and society lead to stresses and dislocations that
resultindemandsfornewpublicpoliciesandstateaction;thosedemands
in turn lead to the creation of new state capacities and powers, with the
result being a larger and more powerful state apparatus. 84 This model
makes appearances in various forms in the work of many scholars, from
Tocqueville and Marx through Weber and Durkheim: Capitalism leads to

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SamuelP.Hays,TheResponsetoIndustrialism1885–1914,2nded.(Chicago:University
of Chicago Press, 1995); Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1967).
83
Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, table no. 1, p. 8; table
no.5,p.10.
84
E.g., see: Skowronek, Building a New American State; and David Truman, The Gov-
ernmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion (New York: Alfred E. Knopf,
1965), p. 55.
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