SOCIOL 1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Elite, Waking Hours, Ingroups And Outgroups
Document Summary
The facilities of power are so enormously enlarged and so decisively centralized surely means that the powers of quite small groups of men, which we may call elites, are now of literally inhuman consequence. The power to make decisions of national and international con- sequence is now so clearly seated in political, military, and economic institutions that other areas of society seem off to the side and, on occasion, readily subordinated to these. The political order has become an executive apparatus which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered, legislative as well as administrative, and which now reaches into all parts of the social structure. The attention of the elite has shifted from domestic problems centered in the "thirties around slump- to international problems centered in the "forties and "fifties around war. The structure and the mechanics of those institutional hierarchies over which the political directorate, the corporate rich, and the high military now preside.
