This paper is confined to Indian, more specifically Hindu, society. It tries to assess the process of change going on in this society from the point of view of new needs and old values. In doing so, it draws on an unscholarly but inside acquaintance with the situation and makes no claim to completeness either of analysis or treatment.

The connection between static and dynamic forces in society became, once again, a topic for debate at the sociological congress held in Amsterdam in 1955. The reason for this renewed interest is not far to seek. Dynamic phenomena of great intensity force themselves on the observer of the contemporary scene. Within the Soviet sphere of influence, the structure of society is undergoing radical changes. At the same time, the Orient and all those areas said, not without reason, to be “developing,” are in the throes of modernization. And finally, even in countries ruled by liberalism and marked by stable institutions, the inner structure of such fundamental social concepts as “individual,” “family,” “stratification,” “organization” and “government” is rapidly being transformed. On the other hand, there are many countries in which society appears to be gravitating towards a static condition, characterized by Veblen more than fifty years ago, as a “new feudalism.” When all areas beyond the present-day borders of capitalism will have been industrialized, capitalism will no longer be able to rely on new resources elsewhere, and its economic expansion, which was once thought to be demanded by the very nature of the system, will have come to an end. Capitalism will then have to revert to simply reproducing itself. This prospect is reflected in our present-day culture. Thus, Olivier Messiaen, a composer of the group known as “La Jeune France,” said only recently, that the historical development of music had reached a ceiling beyond which no further development could be imagined; whether he was right or not, is not the point. What should be of most interest in a discussion of the conflict between static and dynamic forces, is the question which of these will prove to be the stronger; whether the trend of development prevailing since the Middle Ages will continue, or whether it will terminate in a state of paralysis of the kind that Himmler prophesied when he said that the Third Reich would last for ten or twenty thousand years, until the “end of modern times.” But before we can speculate about the outcome of the conflict between the static and dynamic, we must reflect on the ideas connected with them; otherwise it would be like trying to settle the course of world history by idly tossing a coin.

Contemporary society is preoccupied with wealth. There is no need here to distinguish between capitalism and communism. It is a well-known fact that the great declared objective of Soviet economic planning is “to attain and to surpass the American standard of life.”

Every country employs statisticians to compute the annual increase in its national wealth. If the increase is substantial, the government prides itself on it; if it is small, the opposition finds in it a grievance capable of rallying public opinion behind it. In democratic countries, the political organizations that are most firmly entrenched are the ones that seek to advance the pretensions of one group for a larger share of the national wealth, and those that seek to defend the present share of a group against such pretensions. Public affairs consist to a large extent of pleadings and pressures concerning the division of wealth, and to some extent of more technical discussions concerning its increase.

The usual practice in contemporary literature is to treat of economic growth by way of an analysis of the several factors whose joint operation is thought to issue in an expansion of the productive powers of society. There are, for instance, the factors of saving and investment; investment leads to an increase in the social product and, if sufficiently large, to a rise in per capita income. Around this central mechanism of growth, many authors group a variety of contributing factors which perform a more or less decisive role in raising a country from poverty to riches. Those usually discussed include population, entrepreneurship, technology, resources, and a somewhat loosely defined category of social and institutional factors.

A single powerful idea, that of progress, dominated the nineteenth century and became its main symbol—or so it seemed to Renan when he measured “the enormous strides that the science of man has made during the last one hundred years.” Since the waning of the Middle Ages, intellectual progress had gone hand in hand with the rejection of the appeal to authority. Francis Bacon had assigned to this kind of progress a practical goal, and Descartes had provided it with an effective method. It seemed, therefore, that it was capable of going on, for some time at least, by additions to, and a systematic completion of, already existing knowledge. It is in such terms that Pascal described it in the preface to his Traité sur le vide, assimilating the development of mankind to that of “a single individual who lives forever and learns continually.” This picture, which became common to all later doctrines of progress, did not specify whether the human species would continue to progress indefinitely, as Condorcet said it would, or whether it would reach a state of old age and decrepitude and eventually become extinct, as Fourier imagined it. When reason, in the eighteenth century, ceased to be the gift of providence to the established political authorities, it became the property of all men, and the standard by which their conduct was to be judged. The progress of the intellect was thus socialized. In Turgot's words, “the entire mass of men is on the move to greater perfection, though a period of calm may alternate with one of agitation, and good with evil, and no matter how slow the movement may be.” This move took place against the background of an immovable nature, and as a result of the spread of enlightenment throughout society; and according to Turgot and his contemporaries, it could not be stopped by ancient institutions that stood in its way. The framework of nature was soon to be shaken when, at the turn of the century, the theories of Kant and Laplace divested the Newtonian order of its appearance of eternity, and when advances in geology and, finally, the transmutationist theories which culminated in Lamarck's Philosophie zoologique (1809), seemed to show that both inorganic. matter and living species were in the process of transformation. In biology, the criterion of progress was an increase in the specialization of the organism. It is this criterion which Saint-Simon wanted to apply to human societies, reminding us with satisfaction of what he owed to the anatomist Vicq d'Azyr. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, embryological discoveries seemed to show that the biological evolution of man was continuous with that of the lower animals. This gave rise to the idea of a continuous progress, and to the conviction that no valid reason could be found why progress should be confined to the present. The perfection of the individual (sketched tentatively by Condorcet) and the perfection of society found in Saint-Simon, and later on in Spencer, their systematic interpreters; and so did the idea that individual and society were to achieve, either spontaneously or by design, a dynamic equilibrium. Pascal's purely speculative picture was thus transformed into an organic theory of social evolution.

We live in a universe infinitely more complex than that which is evoked by the word reality. Only the desire for pragmatic knowledge allows us to believe that things are simply that which they are: the bearers of material qualities by which we distinguish or manipulate them. We give them names, which designate their genre, and make use of them according to our fancy. They are tools or means which refer us to other things to which they have a relation. When knowledge is elevated to a science, in doing away with appearances we discover their structure, and new types of relations, expressed in the language of figures and numbers, beyond which there is only the possibility of other structures and other numbers. The object is explained either by the finiteness of human needs or by the network of scientific relations. It is what it is, nothing more.

Like a great work of literary art, which indeed it is, Alexis de Tocqueville's extraordinary analysis of American society grows more impressive with each exposure to it. Everything has changed and nothing has changed since Democracy in America was published in the 1830’s. Its author grasped with remarkable perception both the mutable and the immutable qualities of man. There could be nothing more salutary for us today than to assimilate his fine sense of what was permanent in a world which, like ours, was undergoing deep convulsions. Committed to the classical economics of Adam Smith, Tocqueville did not share Smith's illusions about the eternal nature of the market. On the contrary, as Albert Salomon has emphasized, his point of view was Heraclitean, the specter of continual change and ceaseless transformation dominating his thought. Surely such a perspective, which antedates both Darwin and Marx, is more appropriate for sociologists in a revolutionary age than elegantly constructed theories of social equilibrium which treat change as a special problem or a deus ex machina.