The Arms Race and Command Economies since 1945 377
tion, making a once revolutionary party and radically disruptive
unions into undisguised instruments of state control over the indus
trial working force and society at large.
The hard fact remained that only by organizing bureaucratically
could groups assert themselves effectively in a bureaucratic world.
This deprived the counterculture of the 1960s of enduring impor
tance. Yet American technocrats and politicians were compelled to
recognize hitherto unsuspected limits to their new powers of social
management. The great administrative machines created by and con
stituting the skeleton of the national state could not decide at will what
ends to pursue, nor who should manage whom. Reason and calcula
tion came a poor second in settling such questions to ideals and feel
ings. Manipulative propaganda could only establish the emotional cli
mate for mass obedience by staying within limits set by inherited,
widely prevalent beliefs. Fissiparousness, inherent in a highly skilled
and sharply differentiated society, put enormous strains on political
leadership. These strains were not significantly relieved by the fact
that politicians and statesmen could call on the most expert systems
analysis, cost-benefit calculations, and other instruments of modern
industrial, corporate management.^16
Perhaps the most fundamental shift of the postwar decades was a
widespread withdrawal of loyalty from constituted public authorities.
Ethnic, regional, and religious groupings gained importance at the
expense of the national state while at the same time various trans
national collective identities and administrative structures also waxed
stronger than ever before. Within what units and to what ends the
technical virtuosity of modern management would be exercised was a
question that therefore attained a new vibrancy in the 1960s and
1970s. This was especially apparent in the more advanced industri
alized countries, where old-fashioned patriotism seemed clearly on
the wane. How it will be answered in years to come may well turn out
to be the capital question of humanity’s future.
Soviet society was not immune. Khrushchev’s confident promises of
the early 1960s soured when it became apparent that enhanced pro
ductivity, upon which everything depended, was not forthcoming
merely on the strength of exhortation from the Communist party to
work harder in order to enjoy a better life sometime in the future.
- Two books aptly illustrate aspects of this impasse: the cocky assurance of Alain C.
Enthoven and K. Wayne-Smith, How Much Is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program,
1961–1969 (New York, 1971) and the quizzical skepticism of Don K. Price, The
Scientific Estate (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).
