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T nHERE is a tendency to interpret modern history, and particularly the twentieth century, in terms of an increasing bureaucratization. In whatever domain of thought the question has arisen there have been able presentations of the facts of the centralization of industrial and administrative organization. But it is not only in statistical curves that such phenomena receive notice. They make up the stuff of several philosophies of history. It is no accident that Max Weber is more and more frequently quoted for his thesis that the historical drift may be seen as a bureaucratization of industrial societies, irrespective of their constitutional governments. It is this form of organization which is taken to be the substance of history, the more so as it is identified with a growing rationality of modern society. It is clear that the application of occidental science is an indispensable element in the development of large-scale and planned administrations. For Thorstein Veblen, as well as for Weber, the advent of science is a phenomenon unique and central to Western civilization. Veblen focused more directly upon "the sequence of accumulative technology" and drew inferences directly from the fact of its dominance. Apart from the opaque line of technological rationality, social life is drift and habituation. The irrational institutions, particularly pecuniary ones, are in the main only permissive; all they do is occasionally hinder the spread of a mechanical rationality into all areas of life. It is the men who nurse the big machines, the industrial population, who implement that which makes history. For Weber, impersonal rationality stands as a polar opposite to personal charisma, the extraordinary gift of leaders. For Veblen, technology, widely construed, stands opposite irrational institutions. And for both, in whatever other respects they may differ, the rational, the technical pole of history will come through; it will increase to dominate the social life of the West. In this kind of philosophy of history, warfare and revolutions, crises and class struggles, are not the central objects to be explained. They are

Prestige involves at least two persons: one to claim it and another to honor the claim. The bases upon which various people raise prestige claims, and the reasons others honor these claims, include property and descent, occupation and education, income and power—in fact, almost anything that may invidiously distinguish one person from another. In the status system of a society these claims are organized as rules and expectations governing those who successfully claim prestige, from whom, in what ways, and upon what basis. The level of self-esteem enjoyed by given individuals is more or less set by this status system.