purposes for man. It is notable that the first commonly-accepted political
theories to use some other form of justification arose in England after the
Reformation and the Civil War had made any appeal to such united and
powerful religious symbols more dangerous than useful. Until the Reforma-
tion few would have doubted that there were two spheres of influence in a
society, the religious power and the secular, and that the secular only gained its
authority because it was needed to back up the Church, to create the
environment in which man could lead a good life. This, the best-argued
version of the doctrine, was set out most fully in StAugustine’sCity of God.
Division of Labour
Division of labour is the system under which both economic production and
other, especially administrative or policy-making, tasks are handled in all
modern societies. It is a system contrasted to craftsmanship or to generalized
political and social leadership, and it involves the splitting up and distribution
of different parts of any job among several people. In a modern manufacturing
enterprise, for example, not only the manufacture of a car, but even of a simple
object like a pen, may be subdivided into hundreds of very minor tasks, done
repetitively by many people, over and over again, with none of them actually
being responsible for creating the whole unit. Many social theorists, but
especiallyDurkheimandMarx, the latter notably in his theory ofalienation,
have attached great importance to the division of labour as a causal factor in
social development. Although the division of labour is the corner-stone of
modern economic productivity, it is held to have a seriously deleterious impact
on human self-confidence and inter-personal relations by such theorists.
(Though in fact Durkheim also thought it to be crucial for social solidarity.)
In other theories, however, it is seen as a necessary aspect of development and
modernization, and in its political coverage is almost a definitional element of
theories ofpolitical developmentand political modernization. In fact the
division of productive tasks seems to have been integral to all known societies,
though in primitive societies the distribution of tasks was often on a gender
basis. The very earliest of Western political theory assumed automatically that
anything larger than a tiny subsistence economy would require specific tasks to
be carried out full time by particular individuals, and the theories of both
PlatoandAristotlerest much on this form of organization.
Djilas
Milovan Djilas (1911–95) was born in Montenegro and from an early age was a
senior member of thepolitburoof the Yugoslav communist party, fighting
with it from 1940 when it was an underground organization. He became a
Djilas