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Sociology 83
leadership is romantic and dangerous - somewhat like love in Western society.
At the same time, one is supposed to be compassionate, considerate of one’s
neighbour, inoffensive, and not disruptive to others’s peace of mind. The other
connotes ‘an emotion that wells up inside the Burmese preventing him from
pushing himself for his own interest and compelling him to accede to the
demands of others’. The parallel to Lipset’s values of equality and success is ob-
vious. Pye’s study relates the ensuing value conflict to a special family structure
and in turn derives from it many of the difficulties Burma has in organizing its
political life.
A fourth macrosociological variate is the organization. Dahrendorf tries to
‘measure’ the importance of two institutions - the family and the school. This
is organizational research writ large. Increasingly, sociological literature charac-
terizes organizations in the same way as a psychologist characterizes personali-
ties. Many efforts are under way to describe how many levels of authority an
organization has, how its efficiency is related to the morale of its staff, and so
on.’*
In its application to whole countries this art is only beginning. One of the
most interesting examples is provided by Shils in his study of Indian intellectuals.
It is his notion of center and periphery. The center consists of those institutions
and roles which exercise authority of any kind or are role models for the rest
of the system. The periphery consists of those parts of society which are the recip-
ients of commands and of beliefs which they do not themselves create or
cause to be diffused. The two notions can have a spatial meaning as when we
talk of the ‘provinces’, they can have a social meaning implied in the notion
of ‘establishment’. Or they can have a more psychological connotation when we
impute inferiority feelings to Western-trained intellectuals who come from un-
developed countries. Shils discusses in detail the possible relations between
periphery and center. The distance between them can vary, the autonomy of the
periphery can be different, the flow of information between the two can be
more or less unilateral, and so on. This is a truly macrosociological variate
which wil certainly arouse increasing attention.19
Macrosociologica[ processes
The topic of the next few pages falls between two extremes. We may have a
precise definition of social process when dealing with specific variates observed
repeatedly; this matter was discussed in Section I. At the other end, we have
an extensive literature on the logic of explanation in history.20 Among modern
logicians Hempel has taken a position which, in its attenuated form, seems
most helpful for the present purpose. He starts with a rigorous definition
adapted from the natural sciences. The explanation of a simple event proceeds
in the following steps: there is a general law connecting a number of variables
and containing several free parameters; a specific event is characterized by specif-
ic values of these parameters; the combination of the ‘covering law’ and the
specific parameters provides the explanation.
Hempel is aware that, for a variety of reasons, this formula cannot be exactly
applied to complex historical phenomena. He therefore introduces the notion