The Active Society: A Theory of Societal and Political Processes (Book).

The article presents the author's views on sociologist Amitai Etzioni's study on the modern societies. The trouble with the word "modern" is that innovations so designated keep aging; for example, cubist painting or atonal music. Today the "modern societies" of yesterday, that is, the societies that emerged from the scientific and industrial revolutions, seem old-fashioned. A new word is needed to label the societies emerging since 1945, the age of instantaneous communication and annihilation. Etzioni calls these societies "post-modern." Etzioni's thesis is that the "post-modern" age opens the option for a society to become either master or slave of the instruments it creates. To choose the first alternative, the society must become "active," and the goal is emancipation, and the means involve insight through analysis into the nature of the enslaving obstacles. Community, collectivity, organization, society, deviance, control, alienation, consensus, coercion, persuasion, influence, elite, mobilization, social cost, pluralism, power all of these occur frequently in the active society. With the exception of occasional neologisms, Etzioni's conceptual stock is borrowed from common usage, where, of course, meanings vary widely with the context.