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88 P. F. Lazarsfeld
he starts from a theorem that friends are often similar in their social charac-
teristics as well as in their attitudes and preferences. Inversely, groups formed
of people who share many characteristics are likely to be more cohesive, as
their friendship is more resistant to disintegration. Etzioni then moves this idea
from the intrasocietal to the intersocietal level. He reviews the various unifica-
tion efforts among European countries; why has the Common Market been
more successful than other similar schemes? One of the reasons should be the
greater homogeneity of the six participants. They have a similar political struc-
ture - no socialist, no authoritarian government; none is overwhelmingly
Protestant, none neutralist. Similar observations can be made about common
market efforts in Africa and Latin America. Finally, Etzioni applies the theorem
to world government. In the beginning one might have to be content with the
formation of regional communities. After a time, the members of this regional
combine will become more similar to each other - industrialization and world-
wide communication work in the direction of increasing world-wide homogenei-
ty. This will in the end make world government possible. Thus the extrapolation
of a simple sociological theorem becomes more than an explanation sketch for
past events - it leads to ideas for future action on a macrosociological scale.
A variation on the ‘transfer of theorems’ is introduced in cases where the
jump from the original statement to a higher level of aggregation is not as great
as in the preceding examples. Authors then often talk about the ‘application’ of a
theorem. Sociologists and social psychologists stress that in face to face groups
behaviour is strongly guided by a desire to gain or maintain the approval of
peers. Janowitz and Shils apply this idea to explain why German soldiers kept
on fighting when they knew the war was lost; they lived in small units where no
one wanted to be the first to call it quits. A Columbia study gave the same in-
terpretation of how faculties in American universities successfully resisted the
red hunt of the late Senator Joe McCarthy: the danger of his attack was great
but remote, the attitude of one’s colleagues who would have frowned on ‘collab-
oration with the enemy’ had the strength of immediacy and thus added up to
the stronger pressure. Seemingly the broader phenomenon is ‘derived’ from a
basic law, but the derivation is loose and omits so many steps that here, too, it
is better to think of a transfer.
The discussion of variates and explanation sketches as the building blocks of
marcosociology is now completed. A word on the strategy of this section should
be added. The mandate given to the authors of the various chapters com-
prising the present Study provided that each could stress those trends which
seemed to him most characteristic of the contemporary scene. Therefore, the
emphasis on macrosociology does not require special justification; it reflects
the author’s judgment. But why stress the methodological aspects of this move-
ment ?
In the introduction of this section we mentioned as one root of the macroso-
ciological movement a concern with ‘big’ issues and their political implications.
One cannot overlook the danger of a resulting obscurantism: better to guess
about important matters than to study ‘little’ issues, merely because we under-