The historian S. N. Eisenstadt showed how structural differentiation
affected stratification. The process of modernization fragments social status,
so that different people hold positions of high status in different social
spheres. It is not just that roles become more specialized. Leaders in different
institutional spheres – bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, military leaders, intellectu-
als, political élites – do not form definite strata or classes, whereas the ten-
dency is ‘in many pre-modern societies for most property, power and status
relations either to coalesce or to be segregated in a rather rigid hierarchical
order’ (Eisenstadt, 1966, p. 8).
Secularization
Secularization is a process by which societies become more rationalized. It
occurs when people perceive that the circumstances around them are change-
able by human intervention. If religious belief, such as fatalism, prevents
society from seeing the environment in that way then religion may become
an obstacle to modernization. A rational or secular basis of social values does
not accept as unalterable or sacred the facts of life. Secularization means
enabling people to differentiate between the sacred and the profane, the
religious world and the world of material objects. It does not interpret
everything in terms of a set of beliefs about what is sacred and what is
handed down from time immemorial. Those beliefs may remain but people
begin to separate them from secular concerns, the latter then being exposed
to rational scrutiny.
The precursor of this aspect of modernization theory was the German soci-
ologist Max Weber whose theory of social action distinguished between
actions determined by reason and actions determined by habit or emotion.
Bureaucracy was Weber’s model of rational government. In the domain of the
state, bureaucracy epitomized the idea of linking means to ends, and of defin-
ing an objective and calculating what needed to be done to achieve it.
Bureaucracy, based on rules, expertise, plans and calculations, was the ideal
form of authority for the rationalization of politics. Rational–legal authority
combines the idea of means being related to ends with the idea that rules,
offices and public action would no longer reflect heredity, tradition, custom or
charisma. Rules reflect an understanding of cause and effect in the political
sphere. Rather than respect rules simply because they are endorsed by custom,
religion or traditional values, rules are respected because they are instrumental.
Greater rationality is supported by the growth of scientific and technolog-
ical knowledge. M. J. Levy wrote that society was ‘more or less modernized
46 Understanding Third World Politics