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in the medieval West. Even if the members of the lower level threaten
disruption, they would be readily integrated at the higher level. Lacking
such an arrangement, the modern types of culture face a constant threat
of dissolution that leads to totahtarianism as an artificial means of
recouping structure. In this sense the modern Eurocentric conceptions are,
for him, deficient; the standard type would be India. It is to be noted
that his comparison of Western modernity with traditional India allows
him to critique only Western modernity.
A more complex analysis is offered by Weber. He shows that complex
cultures do not require ideal integration; rather their very continuity
depends on struggles among diverse groups, unions of groups, social
organizations, and ideologies. Coherence may be found only at the level
of culturally organized life, yet what holds complex cultures together are
the modes of managing the struggles. Such modes provide benefits and
are partially enforced against those who obtain less benefits. The latter
constitute a source of dynamic change. Yet such a change is more
complex than a mere uprising. For Weber important transformations,
such as breakthroughs into modernity, require a conjunction of elements
that show up very seldom. One requires some form of attainable ethos
addressed to restless groups with their unique imagination of the future
and practical interests, the legal system, and community and kinship
structures.* The Occident is a tension and a balance between the spiritual,
the organized church, and the monastic community, and between a
unique voluntarism of the feudal state, with a limited covenant and an
autonomous bureaucracy possessing a general power of political coercion.
But in the development toward modernity, this is the source of Western
abnormality. Once it reaches maturity, it loses the positioning of various,
even if unequal parts, and becomes dominated by a homogeneous logic
of rationalization; it becomes abnormal, an iron cage.^ If normal is less
rational, then an opposition to modernity will appear in the guises of the
antimodern, the postmodern, and the archaic. The current appearance of
nationalisms tends toward archaisms that are ethnocentric and bear traces
of sacrality, tensed against modernizing secularity.

* Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1958); The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (New York: The
Free Press, 1952).
^ Max Weber, Protestant Ethic, 182f.