Obfuscation of the Obvious

MR. presthus’ subject is an important one, but what he has to say about it has, in itself, no importance at all. The Organizational Society is therefore significant for what it typifies; and since its author claims that his work represents an attempt, financed by the Ford Foundation, to study all the social sciences and to bring their full weight to bear upon the problem at hand, it is perhaps excusable to give the book the review it solicits.

What Mr. Presthus writes about is the bureaucratization of modern society, a subject that has had some importance both for conservatives and Liberals. The Right has to date had the advantage, both of the conceptions of limited and balanced governmental powers that animated the American Republic, and of the thought of Christian theorists who have attempted to define the limited role of institutions that enable, but do not of themselves produce, lives oriented toward ultimate good. The Left, having no such advantage, has tended, at least in America, to stress the bureaucratic organization of big business rather than of big government, and to invoke the concept of “alienation,” which Marx promulgated but unfortunately dropped for a “there’s-the-villain” anti-capitalism. Positively, it has advocated “restoring” to “work” its “joy,” a concept whose unexamined premises Hannah Arendt rather damagingly analyzed a few years ago in The Human Condition. On the propaganda level, the Left has no doubt had the better of it, popularizing an image of Madison Avenue “organization men.”

VM

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Vincent Miller

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MR. presthus’ subject is an important one, but what he has to say about it has, in itself, no importance at all. The Organizational Society is therefore significant for what it typifies; and since its author claims that his work represents an attempt, financed by the Ford Foundation, to study all the social sciences and to bring their full weight to bear upon the problem at hand, it is perhaps excusable to give the book the review it solicits.

What Mr. Presthus writes about is the bureaucratization of modern society, a subject that has had some importance both for conservatives and Liberals. The Right has to date had the advantage, both of the conceptions of limited and balanced governmental powers that animated the American Republic, and of the thought of Christian theorists who have attempted to define the limited role of institutions that enable, but do not of themselves produce, lives oriented toward ultimate good. The Left, having no such advantage, has tended, at least in America, to stress the bureaucratic organization of big business rather than of big government, and to invoke the concept of “alienation,” which Marx promulgated but unfortunately dropped for a “there’s-the-villain” anti-capitalism. Positively, it has advocated “restoring” to “work” its “joy,” a concept whose unexamined premises Hannah Arendt rather damagingly analyzed a few years ago in The Human Condition. On the propaganda level, the Left has no doubt had the better of it, popularizing an image of Madison Avenue “organization men.”