SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND ECONOMIC PROGRESS: GENERAL PROPOSITIONS AND SOME FRENCH EXAMPLES.

The article discusses social structure and economic progress in the United States. For more than a century the primary focus and the very great achievements of economics have centered about an increasingly sophisticated analysis of relationships held to be internal to economics. The massive social upheavals of the last twenty years have forced to the fore new questions not answerable within these traditional restrictive assumptions. Functional structural analysis focuses on attention on the extent to which social action tends to be structured. Any society necessarily institutionalizes particular goals and values, patterns of social relationship and ways of doing things requisite to the continued operation of that social system. From birth the human individual is molded toward conformity with these institutions through the process of socialization. The revolutionary settlement institutionalized a system of peasant proprietors that has to this day kept surplus labor on the land and protected small, unprogressive units that are at once economically inefficient and politically invulnerable.