| Introduction to the Transaction Edition |
| The Future of Industrial Man is considered by many friends and critics to be my best book. It certainly is my most ambitious one. It is the only book of mine that set out overtly to develop basic social theory. In fact, it attempts to develop not one but two social theories. One, it might be called a general theory of society, presents the requirements for any society to be functioning and legitimate. The other, it might be called the special theory of industrial society, then applies these general concepts to the special case of the industrial society as it emerged in the twentieth century and became dominant with World War II. I subtitled the book A Conservative Approach; for status and function, its key concepts, are basically conservative termsterms that go back to Edmund Burke or James Madison rather than to John Locke, let alone to the French Revolution or Karl Marx. The third key term of this booklegitimacy, is also a fundamentally conservative term. Alexander Hamilton would have used it, had it been coined in his day (it dates from around 1820, well after his death), and Benjamin Disraeli did indeed use it. It is a term that recognizes power as a social reality but demands that power be grounded in a higher sanction, in accountability, responsibility, and shared vision. |
| But while "conservative" in a very old sense, this book is not "neoconservative" (a term that, of course, did not even exist in 1942 when the book was first published). In the first place there was no need for me ever to become a neoconservative; for that term identifies a former left-winger, and I have never been one. What we now call neo-conservative, I called "mercantilist" in this bookand I asserted that it had become outmoded and counterproductiveI'd make the same assertion today. For neoconservatism denies rather than affirms the reality of industrial and postindustrial society. It is, in effect, only another term for nineteenth-century Manchester Liberalism that preached that economics was everything. And |
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