Social mobilization is a name given to an overall process of change, which happens to substantial parts of the population in countries which are moving from traditional to modern ways of life. It denotes a concept which brackets together a number of more specific processes of change, such as changes of residence, of occupation, of social setting, of face-to-face associates, of institutions, roles, and ways of acting, of experiences and expectations, and finally of personal memories, habits and needs, including the need for new patterns of group affiliation and new images of personal identity. Singly, and even more in their cumulative impact, these changes tend to influence and sometimes to transform political behavior.

The concept of social mobilization is not merely a short way of referring to the collection of changes just listed, including any extensions of this list. It implies that these processes tend to go together in certain historical situations and stages of economic development; that these situations are identifiable and recurrent, in their essentials, from one country to another; and that they are relevant for politics. Each of these points will be taken up in the course of this paper.

Social mobilization, let us repeat, is something that happens to large numbers of people in areas which undergo modernization, i.e., where advanced, non-traditional practices in culture, technology and economic life are introduced and accepted on a considerable scale. It is not identical, therefore, with this process of modernization as a whole, but it deals with one of its major aspects, or better, with a recurrent cluster among its consequences.

Social scientists are finding an increasingly useful and stimulating tool in the application of statistical techniques to their problems. As in the employment of any new tool, both the utility and the limitations of this one must be learned. It seems beyond reasonable doubt, however, that quantification of data in the social sciences will become a more widely used and rewarding procedure as time goes on.

Prudence dictates that stress be laid on its limitations. The enthusiasm with which a new tool—toy, some would say—is adopted should not blind the user to dangers which may be implicit in its overuse. One cannot squeeze more juice from an orange than the orange contains, no matter how modern the squeezer. Care must be exercised, too, lest the bitter essence of the rind become mixed with the nourishing juice of the fruit itself.

The present analysis is an attempt, in not too complex a fashion, to make use of such techniques to organize and validate data which might otherwise permit only the broadest sort of generalizations by way of conclusion, conclusions unsatisfactory roughly in proportion to their breadth. The senior author of this article has for more than a decade and a half been interested in the problem of objective measurement of certain aspects of political change in Latin America with particular respect to the sum total of phenomena falling under the rubric of “democracy.” On four occasions, 1945, 1950, 1955, and 1960, he conducted a survey among groups of specialists on Latin America to elicit evaluations which then, with the help of such statistical procedures as seemed useful, were summarized and analyzed.

The political activities of the business community in Japan have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. Because of the paucity of information and the lack of serious studies, the nature of the political power of Japanese business is poorly understood. The popular notion that big business is influential in politics is quite correct, but just how the influence is exercised, or how much influence can be brought to bear in a particular field of policy, or what conditions limit or augment business influence are far from clear.

This paper seeks to single out some of the important conditions affecting the impact of business influence in Japanese government and politics. The case approach is used, and the case is the abortive effort toward central bank reform. Even though this episode concerns only a small portion of the government machinery and the single field of monetary policy, it nevertheless demonstrates the methods commonly employed by business to reach decisions within its own group, the competition with others encountered in persuading the government to act, and the strength of bureaucratic forces resisting change. The simplicity of this case is an advantage in depicting the conflicting groups and the influence they were able to exert. Later studies may reveal more of the pattern of business action on other economic problems and in other areas of government and politics. The bank case showed the great influence of group and personal loyalties as well as the power of one of the government ministries.

In all advanced societies there is a distinct tendency for political and economic power to be held and exercised by different kinds of individuals. Even in modern totalitarian states it has been possible to observe quite distinguishable groups playing the leading roles in political and economic life. The aptitudes that go to make a successful political leader and those that produce an effective economic manager are analytically separable. And if the men who comprise the political and economic elites in a single society are markedly different in character and social background, then certain tensions are bound to arise in the areas where their power and authority interact. These tensions may develop even if the two sets of people profess to sharing a common ideology and even if they are ostensibly committed to working toward common objectives. For the kinds of men who enter political and economic vocations are prone to view social reality from different vantage points, and consequently they will interpret their shared ideology in the light of different experience. What will follow, then, is a comparative study of two elite groups in contemporary American society. The purpose of this study, quite simply, is to ascertain what the members of these elites have in common and what they do not.

One result of the advent of the behavioral sciences in political science is that political things are now being studied, to an ever increasing extent, by men with little or no training in political science. Of the 27 authors of essays in the Burdick and Brodbeck volume, American Voting Behavior, for example, only six are political scientists, the others being mainly sociologists, social psychiatrists, and, to a surprising extent, psychiatrists; so that if people were once thought to vote for political reasons, and if a decade ago they were said to vote for sociological reasons, we are now told that in fact votes are expressions of “individual needs to secure gratification of repressed wishes for a certain type of parental image ….” I use the example of voting studies because it is in this area that the approach and the research techniques of modern behavioral science are said to have had the greatest impact.

There would be no disposition to resist this development—certainly it would be indefensible for political science to cut itself off from the insights provided by other social sciences—were it not for the tendency in such works for the political to be reduced to the sub-political and the danger that in this process the political will disappear altogether, so that we will have a political science that refuses to address itself to political questions. This is not a remote possibility. The basic premise of modern social science is the so-called distinction between facts and values.

American students of society and politics for the most part view “historicism”—the ascription to history of an overall direction and goal—with attitudes ranging from skepticism to overt hostility. In the general view, no valid propositions can be framed concerning matters so shrouded in darkness as the course and the end of history. Indeed it may well be asked, when we use such terms, whether we are referring to realities or merely to inventions of the imagination. Historicist theories are also said to tend to undermine concern for the individual; the needs of the present, living person are likely to shrink into apparent insignificance before the imagined events of a future age. On the part of those who in recent years have seen the bloody trails left by pretended ministers of historical missions, such misgivings are understandable.

Are social scientists and political thinkers at liberty, however, dogmatically to reject historicism? It is the purpose of this article to argue that they are not. For if history is without meaning, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that social and political affairs, which make up a large part of what we treat as history, are also without meaning. Why then should one study, or take part in, these affairs? What is at stake, in the last analysis, is our right—or duty—to regard the world we inhabit, not merely as alien material to be used or ignored as we please, but as a realm of being with which we are fundamentally united and in which, consequently, we are properly participants.

The growing concern of students of politics with the social structure of official bodies and the behavior expected of their members promises to make the Senate of the United States a prime target of research. Two recent books make notable contributions and suggest the trend. One is William S. White's Citadel: The Story of the U.S. Senate, an “insider's” impressions based on years of close observation; and the other is Donald R. Mathews' U.S. Senators and Their World, the work of a political scientist. One (though not the only) concern of both books is the system of norms for behavior of members of the Senate. Although reached through different routes (White's largely inferred from observed behavior, Matthews' principally from interviews) their statements of Senate norms and the way they work have much in common. The norms (or “folkways,” as Matthews calls them) are viewed as cultural “oughts” upon which there is a high degree of consensus. The members who conform most closely to the norms are, generally speaking, the most influential and effective members. This general view is almost certainly correct, as it would be for any stable human group; in this the Senate is not unique (as White sometimes seems to suggest it is) but typical.

But what about the senator who does not conform? What is his place in the Senate and what happens to him there? This study will explore these questions through a case study of such a senator. But first it may be useful to try to restate the relevant parts of the analysis of White and Matthews (without holding them in any way responsible for the restatement) in terms of role theory, which will provide the conceptual framework for the analysis of the senator's experience.

The passage of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Revenue Bond Act in 1959 ended a quarter of a century during which the Authority was dependent upon Congressional appropriations to supply the capital investment for its growing electric power facilities. This development marked the first appearance of consensus in the long conflict over the role of TVA in the national economy. The consensus emerged from an impasse between TVA's lack of support in Congress—the result of its narrow geographical limits, its identification with a single political party, and the growing industrialization of states on its borders—and the inability or unwillingness of its opponents to have TVA sold to private investors—the result of intensive support for the Authority among an active few in Congress, the unified nature of the TVA power system, and the huge amounts of power which TVA supplied to defense installations. The resolution of this impasse by authorizing TVA to sell revenue bonds on the public market suggests that in an open political arena like the Congress a stable consensus on policy may arise despite the most ardent efforts of the main contenders to achieve other solutions. Indeed, conflict among independent political forces may well achieve solutions meeting a far wider range of preferences than would be the case if the decision were made by any single official. Since maintenance of adequate Congressional support is a perennial problem for federal agencies, it will be instructive to review the shifting basis of support for TVA in Congress and draw from this experience the appropriate lessons.

It is a commonplace observation of French politics of the past century that men who started out as radicals turned conservative as they grew older, and that party groups launched with radical names and programs, though they kept the names, swung to the Right with the passage of time. In both cases we explain the transformation, in part at least, as evidence of an increasing satisfaction with the status quo, as the political system made room for the newcomer. In Joseph de Maistre we have an example from a somewhat earlier age of a less common phenomenon, the conservative turned reactionary, and impelled, moreover, to develop a systematic justification of his new position. Evidently, no parallel explanation will serve to account for this change, for Maistre, though he found a place for himself in the public life of his time, grew increasingly dissatisfied with the trend of events around him. It will not do, either, to dismiss him—in the manner of the orthodox tradition in the history of political thought—as an authoritarian ogre, or an irrationalist, or simply as a confused man, a split personality with humanitarian impulses and reactionary ideas. There was no inconsistency in this combination. Rather the explanation must be sought in the political situation of his day as he saw it, and in his concern for the perennial problem of political obligation. The positions that concern led him to take, his rationalizations of them, and the difficulties they landed him in, are the subject of this article.