Professions and related occupations have been the fastest growing sector in the American labor force: from 4.3% in 1900 to 14.2% in 1970 (Statistical Abstract, 1971). Not only have the traditional professions expanded—teaching, engineering, science, medicine, law—but also other skills have upgraded themselves and new ones have emerged. We now have social workers and licensed realtors; undertakers become morticians and business school spokesmen talk of the development of business administration as a profession. This proliferation is all the more remarkable because the earlier trend in the American labor force—from the Revolutionary War until late in the nineteenth century—moved in the opposite direction. This earlier development of the American economy saw the breaking down of the closed corporate controls of the traditional professions and a general democratization of occupational access. The shift back to professionalism began in the atmosphere of a nativist counterattack in the late nineteenth century against the influx of culturally alien immigration and political reform in defense of the local powers of the Anglo-Protestant middle class; the revival of closed professional enclaves went hand in hand with the consolidation of the culturally elite universities in control of an expanding educational hierarchy. For as we shall see, far from indicating the triumph of technocratic meritocracy, the development of the modern American professions is only a new variant on the familiar processes of stratification through monopolization of opportunities.
The rise of professional associations was carried out under the popular slogans of modernization and reform, and this idealized image has continued to dominate not only the public but the academic views as well. The most widely accepted sociological description has been an idealized one. A profession is a self-regulating community (Goode, 1957: 194–200). It has exclusive power, usually backed up by the state, to train new members and admit them to practice. It practices its specialty according to its own standards without outside interference. It reserves the right to judge its own members’ performance, and resists incursions of lay opinion; it alone can decide whether to punish or disbar an incompetent member because presumably only it can decide what technical competence is. It has a code of ethics, claiming to dedicate its work to the service of humanity, pledging disinterested and competent performance, and condemning commercialism and careerism.
With this description, it is not surprising that professions have been regarded as the saviors of the modern world.1 Of course, not all “professions” quite live up to the model. The ideal definition is taken especially from medicine and extends fairly well to science, law, and architecture. It becomes strained when applied to engineers employed in large corporations or to teachers in bureaucratic school systems. With the increasing employment of traditional professionals like lawyers and scientists in bureaucracies, the sociology of professions has given much study to the problems of role conflict (e.g., Kornhauser, 1962; Miller, 1967: 755–767). Related issues involve pseudoprofessions like social work and psychiatry, whose professional status is left problematic by their lack of demonstrable efficacious skills.
It is clear that not all occupations can become professions in the strong sense of the term. What we have instead is a continuum, or rather several continua of characteristics conducive to a self-regulating occupational community. Special conditions are necessary (Wilensky, 1964: 137–158). A strong profession requires a real technical skill that produces demonstrable results and can be taught. Only thus can the skill be monopolized, by controlling who will be trained. The skill must be difficult enough to require training and reliable enough to produce results. But it cannot be too reliable, for then outsiders can judge work by its results and control its practitioners by their judgments. The ideal profession has a skill that occupies the mid-point of a continuum between complete predictability and complete unpredictability of results. At one end are skills like those of plumbers and mechanics, which do not give rise to strong professions because outsiders can judge whether the job is well done; supervisors know whether the machinery runs or not, although they may not know why. At the other end are vague skills like administrative politicking or palm reading; these cannot be monopolized because they are too unreliable or idiosyncratic for some to successfully train others in them. Other so-called skills may be entirely nonexistent, such as the case of the social worker, whose professional rhetoric covers up activities as welfare functionaries, or of psychiatrists, whose cures do not exceed the proportion expectable by chance. And, of course, the activity must be strongly desired by clients so that they are willing to allow its practitioners a high degree of autonomy and respect in carrying it out.
This narrows down the ideal-type professional to a smaller group. But it still gives too idealized a view of the “real” professions of medicine, law, and science, and it fails to explain the rising tide of pseudoprofessions in modern society. For the appropriate level of skill, predictability is not the only variable involved in achieving a monopoly over practice. There are also sheer political power and techniques for manipulating symbolic status.
Political power is involved in almost all successful professions; they achieve their monopoly and self-governing rights by getting the force of the state to license them and back up their collective authority over members. Medical examining boards and bar associations control their respective professions through the ultimate sanction of the police (Gilb, 1966).2 Hence, variations in political resources are responsible for the prevalence of professions and pseudoprofessions alike. The proliferation of both in modern America is due to the widespread availability of organizational resources by which occupational groups can gain political influence. It is fostered by American democracy and its structure of federalist pluralism, in which unorganized publics are little represented, but organized interest groups bargain with each other over favored niches. It has been intensified by American ethnic diversity and resulting group conflicts in which professional organizations have been used as a publicly legitimate control device. The extension of licensing powers to various occupational groups has gone on under the banner of liberal reform, fostered by a large lobby of mutually supporting professional groups.
There is also the sheer mystification that goes along with groups acquiring resources to keep outsiders out. The earliest profession was that of the shaman or sorcerer with his secret training in occult powers. The powers themselves were essentially the powers to mystify; without the secrecy and the show, the sorcerer could not play on people’s emotions and influence their subjective construction of reality and thus bring about the psychological suggestibility that produced results. Priesthoods combined these techniques with conscious moral and political leadership of the community. It is out of their collegial organization and their training institutions (the medieval universities) that most other professions (teaching, medicine, law, science) branched off.
The other traditional profession was that of the military officer. It grew out of the institution of knighthood, which arose in stratified societies containing a small dominant class owning heavy weapons and armor, with which to equip themselves, or land and serfs. The position became enshrouded in a mystifying and self-glorifying ideology: the legends of the Round Table and the troubadours, the heroic code of chivalry (Bloch, 1964: 283–331). These altruistic and gentlemanly ideals went along with the standard of a noble (noncommercial and nonmanual) style of life, which eventually became combined with an emphasis on family heredity to produce the closed aristocracies of late medieval Europe. Weber cites the rise of the European aristocracy out of the profession of arms as his major example of a closed status group developing upon the basis of a class; his other example is the Indian upper caste arising from the Brahmin priests (1968: 932–937). The model of professional monopoly is thus a subcase of the more general process of forming self-consciously exclusive groups—what Weber called “status groups.”
Status groups are formed on the basis of common and distinctive experiences, interests, and resources. Status communities may derive both from occupational and territorial (ethnic) situations: Class-based status groups derive from occupational experiences, common interests in struggles for power and wealth, and differential resources for life style, for group mobilization, and for cultural idealization. Ethnic-based status groups derive from the common experiences of once-isolated community settings, the common interests of such groups in struggling against other ethnic groups with which they come into contact, and the resources of their own cultures and ritual procedures that mobilize them as operating groups. Professions are occupational communities; they are thus a type of class-based status group except that the community is organized explicitly within the realm of work itself rather than in the sphere of consumption. Its basis is the practice of certain esoteric and easily monopolized skills and the use of procedures that by their very nature work most effectively through secrecy and idealization. The experiences of selling such services and striving to protect their esoteric quality and ideal image give a common basis for an associational group to form; the interests of the members in wealth, power, and prestige motivate them to institute strong collective controls over insiders and to seek monopolistic sanctions against outsiders; and their resources—esoteric skills, techniques and opportunities for playing on laymen’s emotions, wealth, and personal connections that can be translated into political influence—enable them to organize an occupational community with strong controls and defenses.
These processes have operated in the development of professions in modern America. Many of the techniques by which the professions of today became organized originally and achieved their high status were based on mystification and secrecy regarding their real skills and use of their status background rather than their technique per se. The elite professions in America grew out of older gentry elites: their communal organization from upper-class clubs and their legitimating ideology from the traditions of upper-class altruism and religious leadership. The ups and downs of professions have reflected changes in the balance of political power as well as the threats of rival ethnic and class cultures in Anglo-Protestant America.
Modern technology has contributed to the proliferation of professions in America, although not necessarily because of the intrinsic importance of technical specialization. As Weber pointed out, bureaucratization gives great power to middle- and even lower-level officials because of the mass of paperwork and administrative complexity that shield them from their superiors (1968: 987–988). In the centralized and autocratic European bureaucracies, this has made for a great deal of rank consciousness throughout organizational hierarchies and has led to characteristic inertia and conservatism. The geographically far-flung and economically competitive American organizations, on the other hand, have been a good deal more decentralized, and employees at middle levels have increased their autonomy by claiming professional status. The proliferation of staff departments separate from line authority and the emphasis on the rhetoric of technical expertise in modern America are results of an ongoing struggle in which control becomes ever more dispersed among middle-level functionaries (Barnard, 1938; Chandler, 1962; Crozier, 1964: 231–236).
The rise of the professions in America, then, is an extension of the age-old struggles of self-interested groups using refinements of traditional tactics. They do not represent the technical needs of a new technocratic society. The various industrial societies have diverse forms of professional organization, reflecting their political histories and the sequence of organizational resources available to different factions in the struggle for wealth, status, and power.
What of altruism? Is the image that is projected of the dedicated medical researcher inoculating himself with diphtheria merely a fraud? We should recall, of course, that most professionals do not behave like this. Their sacrifices are confined to spending a few years in medical school—which in fact is as hard in reality as it is in popular myth; medical schools may now be difficult to get into, but they are extremely hard to flunk out of.3 Professionals do work longer hours than the average person, and they may work considerably beyond the 9-to-5 routine. But this is characteristic of all powerful and ambitious people—it is true of business promoters and politicians as well—since their work is well remunerated with high incomes, and pay is usually on a fee, not on a salary basis (Wilensky, 1961: 32–56).4 The altruistic professions, in fact, are among the highest paid, and their “altruism” gives a further payoff in the form of status and deference.
A better explanation of professionals’ altruistic codes of ethics is that they are defenses against the potential distrust of their clients (Wilensky, 1964).5 An occupation that monopolizes an important skill and reserves the right to judge its success or failure can provoke considerable antipathy among those who depend on it. When the doctor or the lawyer is called in, the client is usually helpless and distraught. Moreover, the outcome is often in doubt, even with the best of skilled performance; the disease may be incurable, the case may be unwinnable. In order to protect themselves against the anger of unsatisfied clients (or their surviving relatives), the occupational groups profess strict standards and enforce them against practitioners who bring the entire group into disrepute. As Zilboorg (1941) puts it, it was the public who created the Hippocratic Oath rather than the doctors themselves.
There is great variation in how much the self-interest of professionals requires them to enforce their code of ethics and with what emphases. Codes of ethics among lawyers and doctors serve quite well to reinforce a restrictive club based on genteel manners, to prevent competition, and thereby to keep fees high. The introduction of stringent ethical standards among professionals has always resulted in an improvement of their economic and social position and a restriction of access to their ranks.
Perhaps some individuals have gone through their careers guided subjectively by noble ideals. Some professionals, such as medical missionaries, have not been much interested in wealth. But it is a mistake to explain people’s behavior simply in terms of their own interpretations of it, or to exempt their subjective ideals from sociological explanation. Esteem is a goal like any other. Usually it goes along with a desire for power, especially over the reality-constructing activities of other people’s minds. Medical missionaries have been the imposers of self-satisfied Western culture upon weaker societies, and of Western political dominance as well. We would do well to recall that altruism as an ideal emerged with the rise of organized priesthoods, claiming to speak in the name of the community; at the same time, these priesthoods have been major factors in the history of political struggles. Altruism per se is just as much a part of the conflicts that make up most of history as violence and property.
Professions are no exception to the conflict theory of stratification used in this book. The distinctive forms of mobility channels in modern America are due, to a considerable degree, to the way professions have developed, and this is a matter of understanding the sequence of conflicts that has shaped and continues to shape them. In this chapter we take up three of the biggest and most important professions in modern society: medicine, law, and engineering. A fourth, teaching, has already been considered in Chapter 5.
The evidence that follows ranges more widely in historical time and space than elsewhere in this book. There is an important reason for this. The rise of the professions to very near the top of the stratification ladder has been the primary evidence used by proponents of technocratic interpretations of modern society. Hence, if an alternative interpretation of their rise can be established in terms of credentialism and monopolization via political resources, it will constitute an a fortiori proof of the superiority of one theory over the other. Comparisons are of the essence of any such proof. Hence, I examine several dimensions of comparison.
There are comparisons in time, showing the ups and downs of professional monopolies as their political opportunities have shifted. I take some of these rather far back into history because the organizational form of professional monopolies, in certain crucial cases, long predates their development of real technical skills. I also sketch some comparisons among the various forms in which the professions are organized in different modern industrial societies. This is important in order to show that there are alternative ways of organizing professions. All too often what a functional or structural universalist claims to be inevitable is merely the result of provinciality. It should also be apparent that the range of variations in professional organization, say, among the United States, Britain, continental Europe, and the Soviet bloc, does not exhaust the range of possibilities. But for theory-building purposes, some variation is crucial if we are to see the operating conditions producing these various types. Once we have grasped these principles, we should be in a better position to extend the range of actual types still further and design forms of organization yet untried. Finally, there are comparisons among the three main professions considered here; in particular, the fate of engineering as against law and medicine is instructive, for it tells us that the occupation nearest the core of modern productive technology nevertheless may lack the crucial resources of cultural group organization and formal credentialing to reach above the middle ranges of stratification.
The political process of monopolizing incomes from the practice of particular kinds of work is quite a general one. It goes on today on all levels where credentialing and licensing can be brought to bear upon an overcrowded labor market. It occurs not only in the traditional, high-status “professions,” but also in the skilled trades where state contractors’ licensing now proliferates, and in lucrative sales areas such as those now being monopolized through realtors’ examinations. The details of economic stratification are increasingly modeled by this process.
Along with engineering, medicine is one of the few professions in which it is clear that there is an objective technical skill built upon general principles that can be taught. Medical education is often taken as the epitome of valid technical education, and the related professional monopoly over technical skill seems to be the clearest case of a functionally enforced restriction. If the social organization of power and status are found to be important in shaping the medical profession and medical education, they must a fortiori be so in other occupations and forms of education. That such social conditions are involved may be guessed from the fact that medical doctors have the highest social status and are consistently drawn from the highest social class backgrounds of any major occupation in industrial society. Reforms to raise the technical level of medical training have strengthened rather than weakened these patterns. Modern medicine is one of the most technically skilled of occupations, yet it shows the ambiguities of a purely technical explanation of its social positions and emphasizes the necessity of understanding technical skills and education within a larger context of stratification processes.
Traditional Pretensions
The early history of medicine is particularly revealing. Medicine was an honored profession in medieval Europe. It was one of the three subjects, along with theology and law, taught in the higher levels of the medieval university. Together with law, it attracted the wealthiest students (Schachner, 1962: 183, 373). The university degree conferred a monopoly on practice. In England, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge decayed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and their monopoly power was transferred to the Royal College of Physicians (founded in 1518). The latter enforced knowledge of the traditional medical texts, strictly limited membership, and maintained high social status (Carr-Saunders and Wilson, 1933: 66–75). Sharp distinctions were maintained among physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries. The latter two were looked down on because they involved manual labor and the life style of tradesmen. Physicians alone claimed genteel status because of their learning and their role as dignified consultants who stood above commercial pursuits. Similarly, in colonial America, the “better” doctors—those who could claim classical education and a disinterested outlook—were part of the upper classes, and backwoods practitioners had considerably lower status (Main, 1965: 144–146, 200–203).
What is striking about the traditionally high status of medicine is the fact that it was based on virtually no valid expertise at all.6 The training on which physicians prided themselves consisted of ancient works like Galen, containing physiological theories whose practical application were not merely wrong but positively harmful. Prevailing theories of disease led to practices such as bleeding and purging as major cures. The most renowned physician of colonial America, the scholarly and genteel Philadelphian, Benjamin Rush, promulgated a theory whose recommendations for all ailments consisted of massive doses of enemas. In general, with the exception of Jenner’s smallpox vaccination developed in 1798, there were no valid medical treatments at all until 1850. Then advances in science (largely in France and Germany) led to distinctions among different types of diseases, the understanding of infections and the development of antiseptics, and the recognition of the importance of public sanitation (rather than merely the old quarantine methods) in the control of epidemics. Only after 1880 did medical science begin to develop positive cures (Shryock, 1947: 129–204, 224–273; Mason, 1962: 517–519, 525–526).7
The monopoly position and high standing of physicians before the late nineteenth century, insofar as it was based on claims to actually cure illness and alleviate suffering, was based on fraud. Indeed, whatever practical skill was available was more likely to be found among surgeons and apothecaries than among the elite physicians (Reader, 1966: 31–40). Yet the latter enjoyed not only genteel status, but also lucrative incomes from wealthy patients. Doctors were rewarded for their ritual activities of making a show of power over unknown ills and therefore providing some psychological comfort to patients. The monopolistic organization and the classical learning of the medical profession were simply status-giving accouterments of a guild of priests. Since doctors appeared in emergency situations when patients were most fearful and in need of comfort, they found it crucial to allay fears about their benevolence by emphasizing an ideology of altruism. In England, this was done by such practices as prohibiting holders of medical licenses from suing to collect fees.
It was also desirable for doctors to appear as social equals of their most preferred—the wealthiest—clients. Hence they emphasized a genteel rather than a mercenary lifestyle, a classical education, and a monopoly organization designed to keep out the nongenteel. Because of these requirements, even medieval doctors were drawn from the wealthier classes; successful practice necessitated spending a great deal on living in a style that would attract the proper sort of patients. Once a practice was established, the returns might eventually be great, as physicians benefited from the gratitude of rich persons with whom they happened to be in attendance while spontaneously recovering from an illness. These conditions also explain why most doctors were concentrated in the big cities—in England, virtually all resided in London, and in the American colonies, the eminent doctors were in the major coastal cities—for it was here that the wealthy patients were found (Main, 1965: 99–101; Reader, 1966: 16–20).
When medicine finally acquired a valid skill base in the late nineteenth century, the prevailing social pattern was already set and reforms were absorbed within it. In England, the surgeons and apothecaries made efforts in the context of the general political mobilization of the middle class in the nineteenth century to acquire autonomous licensing powers giving them wider scope for practice and at the same time requiring stricter (and more practically oriented) training qualifications. Under these pressures, the physicians were forced to reform in 1858, with further modifications in subsequent years, raising their own technical qualifications and amalgamating their organization with that of the surgeons. Apothecaries, however, were placed in a position clearly subordinate to doctors. The medical profession was thus reorganized into high-status and low-status segments, drawn from upper and lower segments of the middle class, respectively (Carr-Saunders and Wilson, 1933: 75–89; Reader, 1966: 59–68).
In France, a more extensive revolution was carried out. The old university faculty of medicine was eliminated entirely in the aftermath of the 1789 Revolution and replaced by a medical profession based on training in public hospitals and oriented toward scientific research. It was this group that began to raise medicine into a science, followed by the research-oriented medical faculties of the German universities around mid-century. Their emphasis on technical validity rather than commercialism is shown by the rise of an ideology of “therapeutic nihilism” among them, stressing that their aim was to understand rather than to pretend to cure. The government-employed medical scientist thus acquired the highest esteem on the Continent, while the private practitioner was regarded for a considerable period during the nineteenth century to be a quack (Shryock, 1947: 129–176).
In the United States, yet another pattern appeared. The original English forms of organization were modified during the colonial period by the trend toward egalitarianism in politics and status relations. The distinction between physician and surgeon disappeared, and the medical practitioner came to be trained informally by an apprenticeship, usually lasting 6 years (Stookey, 1962: 3). Away from the coastal towns, the standard was more lax, and a large number of practitioners of varying degrees of certification eked out a living.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century, the upper-class American physicians gradually organized to regain something of the professional control found in England. Those who could afford it traveled to Europe, especially to Scotland or Holland, for the added status of university study. Under the leadership of such men, medical societies were formed that promulgated codes of ethics calling for restriction on advertising, forbade public criticism of others’ practice, and secured licensing laws in most colonies and states between 1760 and 1830 (Shryock, 1947: 215, 219). These elite physicians also made efforts toward raising the status of the profession through medical training, albeit of the scientifically worthless classical sort. The first American medical school was established at the University of Pennsylvania in 1765, followed by King’s College (later Columbia) in 1767, Harvard in 1783, and Dartmouth in 1798. On the eve of the Revolution, however, only approximately 400 of the 3500 American practitioners had attended medical school. Nevertheless, under the pressure of the elite medical societies, medical licensing came to be a prerogative of medical schools, and a fairly uniform requirement for the medical degree had come into existence by about 1820: apprenticeship to a practicing physician for 3 years, during the last 2 years of which one attended medical school (Shafer, 1936: 33–36; Carver, 1965: 100–101).
Democratization
The decline of the federalist aristocracy through the successive waves of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy reversed the trend toward upper-class control on the English pattern. As early as 1810, the restrictive power of formal educational requirements was weakened by the founding of many new medical schools. In the course of the century, some 450 schools were established in the United States and Canada, of which 155 had survived in 1907 (Flexner, 1940: 77). Like the university-affiliated schools, they were generally proprietary—organized by a group of practitioners who augmented their incomes by sharing student fees. Since college charters generally contained unlimited powers and proprietary medical faculties were no expense, many colleges acquired nominally connected medical schools. The course of instruction usually lasted only a few months. The commercialism inherent in these arrangements offended the upper-class doctors, and periodic efforts were made to establish inspection by state boards of trustees. The American Medical Association (AMA), founded in 1847, attempted to further these purposes.
But popular resentment against upper-class control nullified these efforts. By 1845, restrictions on practice were repealed in 10 states and existing legislation was left unenforced in virtually all others (Shryock, 1947: 215–218). At the same time, the status of the traditional medical profession came under serious attack. In addition to American political changes, developments within medicine itself played a part in this decline. With the gradual rise of medical science in Europe and its attendant stance of “therapeutic nihilism”—an honest refusal to claim cures where none existed—a large number of pseudosystems and pseudoscientific remedies appeared. These ranged from patent medicine to systems of hygiene and mental techniques such as Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science. Both the more scientifically oriented doctors and the more traditionalistic (both of which were found most heavily among those of highest class backgrounds) opposed the commercially oriented practitioners as “quacks.” Yet at the same time, they could offer nothing better in their place. The effort of elite physicians to suppress commercialism, then, was popularly regarded as a selfish attempt to monopolize practice for themselves—as, in fact, it was.8
Reform
After 1870, a number of changes occurred that began to increase the resources of the medical elite. An effective medical science began to develop in Europe. Once again, it was the wealthier classes who were able to take advantage of the opportunities—by being able to travel abroad for training and by being able to devote themselves to public health activities that began to cut into the disease rate late in the century and simultaneously to reestablish the esteem of the profession as both effective and altruistic. With these developments, medical education was gradually transformed. Johns Hopkins Medical School was founded in 1893 as an explicit importation of the German clinical research–oriented university, and other German-trained faculties were developed at Harvard and Michigan, as well as a few other places. These faculties, in alliance with upper-class doctors in the AMA, began an effort to reform the rest of the educational system.
The improvement in technical resources—more precisely, their creation as effective tools for the first time—took place in a larger social situation that especially mobilized the higher-status doctors and gave them important outside allies. For the period after 1870 was also one of mass Catholic immigration and heightening ethnic consciousness. As in other spheres, the Anglo-Protestant medical elite enjoyed new political and ideological support and was able to use it to mobilize its members into a tighter organization and to ride with the prevailing mood of political “reform.” The moralistic Protestant tradition invoked by reformers against Catholic vices and political power was nicely exemplified by the image of the altruistic, scientific doctor, struggling to free the world of disease and to rid his profession of quacks.
Yet a third structural change gave the medical elite the political resources it needed. The period after 1870 was also one of consolidation of the national economy. Intense conflict was generated within the business community itself, between the new and threateningly monopolistic national corporations and their financial allies on the one hand, and the smaller local and agricultural businesses on the other. The turn of the century thus saw, among the other conflicts of the time, a movement by smaller business to limit the national monopolies. The more important side of the “antitrust” movement was less visible: On the local level, business interests mobilized to protect themselves, producing a burst of legislation at the state level favoring local combinations in restraint of trade (Cutler, 1939: 851–856; Wiebe, 1967; Berlant, 1973: 299–301). The associations of retailers and small producers that have controlled local business in twentieth-century America date from this period. Such laws restraining trade also favored professional associations, and the AMA rode this wave into its current monopolistic position.
Between 1875 and 1900, medical societies were able to have many states reestablish the examining and licensing boards that had existed early in the century. In 1891, the AMA helped organize the National Conference of State Medical Licensing Boards to push for uniform state licensing procedures. The existence of a large number of schools with openly commercial orientations posed a major obstacle, especially since their graduates could be found at many levels within the medical profession, even acting as a restraining influence within the AMA. In 1890, the Association of American Medical Colleges was formed, but it made little headway in limiting licensing powers to the more elite schools. In 1900, however, the reforming faction within the AMA was able to reorganize it on more elitist lines (Shryock, 1966: 30–32). The task of rating the various medical schools remained too touchy for decisive action by the organization. Outside aid was called in, in the form of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
This organization was set up in 1905 under the leadership of Henry S. Pritchett, a genteel scientist and former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), who had persuaded Andrew Carnegie to make the endowment. Pritchett, in turn, called on a layman, Abraham Flexner, to make a report on medical schools as a disinterested outsider. Flexner was hardly disinterested, except in the commercial sense. Deriving from an upwardly mobile German-Jewish family, he had attended Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Berlin, had run a private school preparing wealthy students for the Ivy League colleges, and was known for his writings recommending educational reforms in America along German lines. Flexner gained entrée into the medical schools of America by giving the impression that he represented potential Carnegie endowments. In 1909, Flexner visited all 155 medical schools in the United States and Canada, usually spending a few hours at each (Flexner, 1940: 70–88).
His report, published by the Carnegie Foundation in 1910, described conditions in every school by name, showing that virtually all lacked laboratory facilities, were staffed by faculties with few academic qualifications, and accepted students with little previous education. Only 50 of the 155 required high school degrees or the equivalent for entrance, and even this requirement was often unenforced (Flexner, 1910: 29–36). Flexner recommended that 2 years of college training—then found in only 25 schools—become the prerequisite for medical school admission, with certain variations to fit regional conditions: In the South, where European-style university education was least developed, Flexner bypassed the universities and called for the establishment of medical school admission requirements equivalent to those of the state universities; and for admission to the leading medical schools, such as Hopkins and Harvard, he recommended 4 years of college. He further proposed the outright abolition of the weaker schools, reducing the total from 155 to 31, and the intervention of state medical boards in setting medical school admissions requirements, overseeing facilities, and licensing graduates.
By 1920, virtually all the schools on Flexner’s blacklist had closed down. The medical schools that survived were almost all tied to universities and began to raise admission prerequisites toward a full college degree. Interstate licensing agreements became standardized, with the consolidation of previous boards into the Federation of State Medical Boards in 1912. The AMA’s Council on Education, established in 1904, took over Flexner’s school rating work on a continuing basis, becoming a center of absolute authority over schools by 1920. The power of the AMA was firmly established. In 1916, specialty boards began to appear within it, which achieved great influence despite their legally voluntary status. Thus even its informal arrangements came to take on binding force (Shryock, 1966: 42).
The organization of American medical education had several effects. The raising of standards was accompanied by the reestablishment of the earlier guildlike elite. The aftermath of the Flexner report reduced the number of medical students in America from over 28,000 in 1904 to below 20,000 in 1907, with a long-run decrease in the proportion of doctors per capita: from 164 per 100,000 in 1910 to 125 in 1930, rising again to 142 in 1960; along with an alleged increase in the quality of training went a decrease in availability of doctors and a rise in their average incomes (Friedman and Kuznets, 1945; Shryock, 1947: 285; Historical Statistics, B181; Rayack, 1967). Unorthodox practitioners and quacks were greatly restricted; so were any other doctors who resisted the political and economic policies of the professional associations. Doctors’ prestige, seriously sagging in the middle of the nineteenth century, was raised by 1925 to a position at the top of all occupational status polls (Hodge et al., 1964: 289–302). Medical students have also reattained their top-ranking position among university-level students in social class background, if indeed they had lost that position during the efflorescence of schools in the nineteenth century (Davis, 1965: Table 2.19).
The same historical period saw a major shift in the location of medical practice, from almost exclusively home care in the late nineteenth century to a heavy reliance on hospitalization in the early twentieth.9 The number of hospitals in the United States went from 149 in 1873 to 6762 in 1923. A movement for hospital organization, founded by the American College of Surgeons in 1913, was instrumental in this change. The political and economic effects upon the profession of this organizational shift were enormous. The displacement of home care was crucial in establishing effective control over individual practitioners since hospital committees not only came to influence career access through the new rules on internship and residency, but also exercised a permanent hold over all local members of the profession by controlling their hospital use privileges. At the same time, and above all during the decade of 1910–1920, hospitals shifted their economic policies from the traditional charity orientation to an emphasis on private, paying patients. In comparison with the more hierarchic and government-controlled European hospitals growing up in the same period, American hospitals became essentially adjuncts to the private practices of the local coalition of physicians; depending on these doctors for the medical services which they monopolized, and exercising no controls over their fees, the hospitals were forced to provide for them the free overhead of diagnostic and administrative services and professional assistance. From the point of view of professional power, status, and economic gain, the result for the American doctors was ideal.
In relation to the overall structure of American education, the new organization of the medical profession served especially to shore up the position of the university based on liberal arts. Nonuniversity medical schools were largely eliminated, doomed by their lack of high-status backing. The surviving medical schools came to require previous college training, thus eliminating any potential rivalry. Also avoided were the continental European pattern, whereby medical education was begun at the entering university level, and the English pattern of training in teaching hospitals. American medical studies became a purely postgraduate course, with hospital training postponed until after the medical degree. The lengthy and expensive contest mobility style of the American education system was thus further enhanced.
The contest mobility emphasis extended within the medical profession as well. Training in basic medical services and in specialties remained essentially informal, but became added on at the end of a unified medical school curriculum taken by everyone in the form of hospital internship and residence programs. The actual practical skills of medicine have thus been acquired on the job, as they are in most occupations (see Chapter 1); the elaborate educational requirements leading up to and including medical school have served primarily for screening, indoctrination into the group, and an idealized facade. Separate statuses within the profession have been created by lengthening the period of training rather than by dividing it at an earlier point. One result has been to enhance the upper-class status of the profession by making its most prestigious positions require the most expensive training.
The pattern has also resisted expanding the availability of medical treatment by the provision of specialists of limited competence in areas of routine work. Obstetrics has become a specialty trained in postgraduate work, and the earlier occupation of midwifery has been eliminated by absorption into the area of physicians’ practice rather than upgraded as a separate specialty. Similar processes have prevented nursing from taking over routine public health functions. The very existence of a closed, subordinate occupational hierarchy for women in medicine simply continues the traditional segregation of women into menial positions and their separate organization within religious and charitable activities (as if not to contaminate the office charisma of the dominant male roles in the spheres). Thus even with the token integration of women into the ranks of physicians in the twentieth century, the legacy of sexual stratification remains, with the existence of nursing careers as a separate enclave, differentiated from menial task workers at the bottom, essentially homogeneous by sex, and without promotion channels into the higher positions of medical authority. In America, nursing has become increasingly “professionalized” with educational requirements and internal status hierarchies, but the result of this closing in of the corporate barriers has been to reinforce its subordinate position. Ironically, comparative studies show that there is more delegation of medical power (such as in the areas of anesthesia, inoculations, and delivery in normal childbirths) to nurses in Europe (where specialized training programs are lacking) than to the more formally trained American nurses (Glaser, 1963: 61–62; Perrow, 1965: 960–965; Mechanic, 1968: 345, 357–358).
The organization of American medicine in the era of its first technological effectiveness has thus incorporated numerous aspects of traditional stratification. The newer structures have built upon the organizational advantages of the old for an elite that was lucky enough to find the right allies in the larger social conflicts of the early twentieth century. The history of the medical profession illustrates how the efforts to raise the levels of technical expertise, the displays of altruistic dedication, and the struggle for economic and status advantages are by no means mutually exclusive.
Like American government, the American legal profession had its roots in the history of English government organization. The profession of full-time specialist in laws and legal procedures began to appear in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries initially as an officer of the king’s court (Carr-Saunders and Wilson, 1933: 37–55; Harding, 1966: 167–190, 285–291, 351–354, 389–394). The first professional lawyers were judges who trained their successors by apprenticeship. The apprentices took on functions in the courtroom and gradually came to monopolize pleading before the royal judges. Training moved out of the courtroom and into the Inns of Court, which were the residences of the judges and practicing attorneys. The latter, after several reorganizations of their own ranks, finally became a group known as barristers. The members of the Inns became organized as a strong guild held together by a common aristocratic or gentry background and came to monopolize training in the law as well as its more fundamental resource: control of official business access to the government.
There were law professors at various times at Oxford and Cambridge, but the universities were never able to break the London monopoly on law training. Most clearly of any profession, monopoly over practice in the law is a matter of political power, and the conditions of power favored the London guilds. The universities, on the other hand, were agencies of the Church, and the civil law taught there was essentially codified Roman law, the instrument of bureaucratic centralization. The Common Law taught by the apprentice method, by contrast, consisted of procedural lore and historical precedent, which left greater power in the hands of the practitioner (Weber, 1968: 785–788). The nature of the skills that the professional group was to monopolize was thus shaped by its relative political power.
The relative weakness of the English kings and their centralized bureaucracy, and the eventual victory of the lesser aristocracy in the seventeenth-century revolutions, consolidated the power of the lawyers’ guild. (In contrast, on the Continent the law was codified and taught monopolistically by the universities, and lawyers became administrators in government bureaucracies.) In England, a small, self-selecting elite of barristers, giving informal training in the Inns of Court, monopolized practice before the government courts of London as well as judgeships in those courts. Justices of the Peace throughout England, on the other hand, were usually amateurs drawn from the ranks of the local gentry. The barristers’ monopoly of court functions helped create a second group within the legal profession: the solicitors, men who advised clients, prepared cases for trial, and handled matters outside of court. This group arose to meet the needs of clients, especially those outside of London; in effect, the barristers were too much officers of the court to be very responsive to outsiders. The barristers outranked solicitors, both by virtue of their monopoly over access to court and through control of training. Solicitors originally tended to be drawn from the ranks of those who attended the Inns of Court for some time short of the period (sometimes as long as 10 to 15 years) necessary to become a barrister. (This very long period of training necessitated considerable wealth on the part of aspirants, and thus served to severely monopolize the legal profession by class.) Later solicitors came to be trained almost entirely by apprenticeship or through schools of their own. This formal ranking within the legal profession did not come about in America, due to its own peculiarities in the organization of political power.
Colonial Oligarchy and Postrevolutionary Democratization
Colonial America was a transplant of English institutions, but with a bias toward even greater decentralization. The geographic remoteness of the colonies from England and of inland settlements from coastal centers, in a time of poor transportation and frontier expansion, contributed to this pattern. The practice of law, however, in the prerevolutionary period was virtually monopolized by the upper class of wealthy merchants and planters, who did their best to emulate the English pattern of the closed legal caste (Main, 1965: 101–103, 146–147, 203–206). In the South, wealthy planters tended to send their sons to the Inns of Court in London for legal training. In the northern colonies, bar associations developed in most of the populous places after 1750, beginning originally as social clubs, but gradually coming to control admission to practice. The colonial legislatures, following English precedent, delegated to the courts the power of admission to practice before them. In the late eighteenth century, the local bar associations, especially in Massachusetts and New York, had in turn been delegated responsibility for recommending lawyers for admittance, amounting to de facto control; their members comprised a powerful political elite.10
The Revolution reversed the trend toward legal oligarchy. Since lawyers were closely associated with the upper class in background and in practical interests, it was among this group that British sympathizers were most concentrated. Therefore a considerable proportion of lawyers emigrated during wartime persecutions of Tories. The prevailing custom of the bar to limit practice to a narrow social elite also contributed to lawyers’ unpopularity, as did their prominence in efforts to collect wealthy creditors’ claims in the period following the Revolution. The successful struggle to extend the franchise and the relative egalitarianism of the newer frontier states brought a shift in power to those hostile to a privileged legal caste. As a result, standards of admission to the bar became extremely loose, and bar associations crumbled and disappeared as their powers waned. The distinction between barristers and attorneys, which had grown up during the colonial period in imitation of the English system, disappeared with the democratization of the legal profession (Griswold, 1964: 10).
In the period between 1800 and 1870, power over admission to the bar devolved to the local courts, reinforced by rapid changes of settlement and the irregularities of communications. In its more extreme form, this meant that admission in one court conferred no right to practice before others, although it was more usual for the right to practice in one to carry admission before any other court in the same state. Centralized admissions (in theory but often not in practice) were found in 8 out of 30 states and territories in 1840 and in only 10 out of 39 in 1860.
The bar examination itself was usually oral and administered in a very casual fashion. Standards requiring preparation before admission to the exam were exceptional. Such requirements as were left over from the period of colonial oligarchy were diminished by the movement for open access after the Revolution, in 1800, 14 out of 18 states and territories required a definite period of professional study, declining in 1830 to 11 out of 30, and in 1860 to 9 out of 39.
Throughout the nineteenth century, legal education was correspondingly informal. The chief method of education was apprenticeship in a lawyer’s office, during which the student did small services, served papers, and copied legal documents (until the invention of the typewriter late in the century). In his spare time he read what law, history, and general books were available. In the offices of leading lawyers, the student was often charged fees for his apprenticeship. Given the expense of such training (since even if there were not fees, the student worked for free), many men prepared themselves for the profession by their own reading. Abraham Lincoln is the most famous example of the latter type of training, but it was also found among sons of the very wealthy, for whom it was merely an extension of prevailing patterns of home study or tutoring.11
There were a few university professorships of law, established as far back as 1779 at William and Mary and 1793 at Columbia, as well as at Harvard in 1817 and Yale in 1824. But attendance was so spotty that the Columbia chair was left vacant between 1798 and 1823, and an experiment begun in 1790 at the College of Philadelphia lasted only 2 years. Such courses as were given were short and informal, covering the same materials as apprenticeship programs and allowing students to drop in and out as suited their own convenience. Standards of passing the course were minimal; a single final oral exam was typical.
In addition to the universities, there were a number of private proprietary schools run by lawyers. The most famous was run by a judge at Litchfield, Connecticut, from 1784 to 1833. It offered a 14-month course, and its students included many who were to rise to positions of political eminence, among them two vice presidents of the United States, three Supreme Court justices, as well as numerous justices of high state courts, cabinet officers, congressmen, and governors. Yet this school gave no diploma. At the time, university law degrees were of little worth. The system was not one of formal certification; the egalitarian cast of political power in nineteenth-century America extended to legal practice as well. A school like that at Litchfield appeared to have made its success primarily as an informal club of members of elite families. Even this school collapsed in the 1830s, as the tides of political power moved away from the New England federalist establishment and toward the West. In 1833, it was estimated that the total number of law students in any kind of school, proprietary or university, was below 150, and that the overwhelmingly dominant form of training was apprenticeship.
The Movement for Elite Control
From the 1870s onward, several interrelated changes took place which reestablished formalized stratification within the legal profession and brought university law schools to a commanding position. A nationally prominent group of lawyers developed, along with the consolidation of corporate control in the national economy. At the same time, university professors of law began to make claims for the scientific status of law. The combination of these events, along with an upper-class and upper-middle-class political movement in response to urban immigrant and working-class politics, led to the reestablishment of bar associations and efforts to restrict admission to the bar.
Before the Civil War, most legal business concerned land and commerce, especially representing speculative interests in the West. After midcentury, the most lucrative business came to center around the big corporations, beginning first with the railroads. After the Civil War, the position of general counsel for the railroads was the most highly esteemed legal position, and high-ranking judges were known to resign to take such positions during the 1880s and 1890s. During the same period, lawyers became closely involved with the major banks and began to sit on boards of directors. Lawyers were central in the growth of corporations, devising new forms of charters, helping companies and trusts to organize national business, while taking maximum advantage of variable state laws concerning incorporation and taxation. Their aid did much to enable major financial interests to gain control of manufacturing enterprises through stock manipulations and other devices, and details of the concentration of monopoly control in the post–Civil War economy were worked out by the legal profession (see Ripley, 1916; Chandler, 1968: 223–234; Berle and Means, 1968: 119–243).
It was through these activities that the large modern-style law firm came into existence. Prior to 1850, law practice was individual or carried on in two-man partnerships. After 1850, the most prominent partnerships—those dealing with corporate business interests—began to specialize internally, with one man handling the court appearances, the other becoming the “office man.” At the same time, business clients began to solicit formal “opinions” from law firms on legal aspects of prospective policies, a practice that gradually led to the establishment of permanent relationships between firms and corporations. The size of major firms began to grow: The New York firm of Strong and Cadwalader grew from 6 lawyers and 4 staff assistants in 1878 to 23 lawyers and 20 staff assistants in 1913, and to 57 lawyers and 85 staff assistants in 1938. The currently prominent firm of Cravath, Swaine, and Moore, originating in the middle of the nineteenth century in the partnership of Treasury Secretary William H. Seward, had developed to 19 lawyers in 1906 and 94 lawyers in 1940.
To be sure, such large firms were the exception and remain so even today. The majority of lawyers in private practice (56% in 1964) continue to practice alone, usually in a particular ethnic community, and this has doubtless been the case throughout (Carlin, 1962; Ladinsky, 1963: 47–54; Griswold, 1964: 5). By far the largest concentration of big firms (20 of the 37 firms with more than 50 lawyers in 1959) was in New York City (Smigel, 1964: 29, 178). The prominence of the “Wall Street law firm,” allied to the major corporations, originated in the late nineteenth century, growing along with the corporations whose economic dominance they helped make possible. What was occurring was not the raising of the economic status of lawyers as a whole, but the emergence of an elite within the profession tied to the newly consolidated business elite.
At about the same time, the teaching of law began to be reformed. In 1870, Harvard University began to teach law by the case method. Instead of using the older system of text reading and lectures, the instructor carried on a discussion of assigned cases designed to bring out their general principles. The advocates of the case method, notably Harvard Law Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell, held that law was a general science and that its principles could be experimentally induced from the examination of case materials. At the same time, Harvard introduced the practice of hiring instructors whose whole career was devoted to legal scholarship, rather than hiring former practitioners. Both innovations were supported by Harvard’s new president, Charles W. Eliot, a former M.I.T. chemist, who was the first scientist to be appointed president of a major American university and the first leading advocate of the approach of the scientific researcher in university education. In this era of scientific advance, legal educators had to make their pretenses of sharing in these developments. Under this new emphasis, the lax oral examination for the law degree was replaced by a series of written exams with increasingly formal standards. In 1896, Harvard established the college degree as prerequisite for admission to law school (Griswold, 1964: 51–52).
The case method and the other Harvard reforms did not begin to take root elsewhere, except at other Ivy League schools, until after 1890, and became firmly established as a model to be emulated only after 1900. In the intervening period, a movement began that was to bring the Harvard method to the fore; the establishment of bar associations and their efforts to control admission to legal practice. The first bar association was established by a group of leading lawyers in New York City in 1878 as a response to a series of scandals involving the Tweed political machine. Wealthy Chicago lawyers founded a bar association in 1874, again motivated by the aim of bringing under control a group of nonelite lawyers involved in a local political machine. In all, 16 city and state bar associations were founded between 1870 and 1878, almost all in conjunction with efforts at municipal reform and the assertion of control over members of the bar active in corrupt local politics.
Even more explicitly than the AMA, the elite legal profession thus organized itself through the cultural and political mobilization of the late nineteenth-century ethnic crisis. The bar associations were Anglo-Protestant; the “corrupt” lawyers were largely ethnic or the representatives of ethnic enterprises. The concept of “corruption” itself is only the definition imposed on the situation by Anglo-Protestant values; the illegal or immoral activities protected by the political machines were the gambling, sports, prostitution, saloons, and riotous entertainment favored by immigrant and working-class culture.
The culmination of this wave of organization among upper-class lawyers came in August 1878, when the American Bar Association (ABA) was formed at Saratoga, New York. The organizer, and for many years the leader, of the ABA was Simeon E. Baldwin, a Yale law professor, judge, counsel to major financial organizations, and staunch political conservative. The upper-class nature of the ABA was evident. Saratoga Springs, where the ABA held its annual meetings until 1889, was a fashionable upper-class summer resort, and the nucleus of the ABA grew out of a group of wealthy lawyers who had habitually vacationed there. In keeping with its composition and aims, for many years the ABA made no effort to proselytize. Indeed, its admission policy was quite exclusive, and until a new phase occurred after 1912, membership never exceeded 3% of the lawyers in the United States. Even after the period of expansion, it included only 17% of American lawyers in 1940 and 40% in 1964, and its officers have always been drawn from high-status origins (Hurst, 1950: 289; Griswold, 1964: 23; Domhoff, 1967: 61).
This was in keeping with the aims of the ABA and of the leading local bar associations: to reassert upper-class and especially WASP control within the profession, and by extension, in politics as well. The ABA’s political pronouncements from 1896 to 1937 were predominantly conservative, opposing capital gains taxes, favoring injunctions in labor disputes and the teachings of “Americanism” in the schools, and advocating softening of antitrust laws (Hurst, 1950: 363). Its main activities, however, were for reform within the legal profession, stressing higher educational requirements and attendant restrictions on admissions to practice.
The ABA took the lead in forming and financing the Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. Commissioners were formally appointed by state governments, but in practice were nominated by the ABA from among its own ranks. The local bar associations also played a part in raising standards of admission to practice. Centralized state boards of bar examiners, found in only 4 states in 1890, spread to almost all by 1914. Written exams, introduced by the leading university law schools, rapidly displaced oral exams after 1900. By 1937, 35 states had adopted the ABA standards for minimum qualifications at the bar. In 1860, only 9 out of 39 states and territories required any definite period of legal study; in 1890, 50%; in 1920, 75%; and in 1940, all states required professional study.
The change of standards meant, in practice, the adoption of the standards of the leading law schools. The informal oral exam was replaced by written exams patterned after school exams, and generally made up and graded by bar association members with close ties to the leading schools. The adoption of formal educational requirements for admission to bar exams further strengthened the schools, so that by 1940, 3 years of study was being required by 40 states. Once this was well under way, an effort was made to incorporate the standards of the leading and most exclusive law schools into the bar exam prerequisites by calling (in 1921) for the requirement of 2 years of college as preparation before law studies—a requirement adopted by 66% of the states by 1940. The leaders in the whole effort of reform included the group within the ABA made up of university law teachers—a group that included the founder of the association, Simeon Baldwin of Yale. In 1893 they organized the association’s section on legal education, headed by a Harvard law professor. This group in turn organized the Association of American Law Schools in 1900 as an accrediting association. In 1923, the ABA’s section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, headed by former Secretary of War Elihu Root, began formally to publish ratings of law schools according to their compliance with ABA’s standards of educational prerequisites.
The process of tightening control went forward rather slowly, however. The decentralized state of the bar gave considerable power of resistance to the minor lawyer, and the patently upper-class and exclusionary policies of the ABA and leading Eastern bar associations provoked considerable hostility on the part of the less prosperous or less conservative lawyers, especially the ethnic and rural lawyers whom the bar association policies were designed to restrict. By the 1920s, bar associations in the West began to campaign for an “integrated bar.” This was a euphemism for a bar association with compulsory membership, an official monopoly over practice, and legally enforceable powers of discipline over members. Such laws were in force in 20 states by 1940, mostly in the West and the South. Their geographic concentration reveals something of the dynamics of control within the legal profession, for it was in these states that the bar was more homogeneously drawn from upper-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds, and rival ethnic communities were less in evidence than in the East (Adams, 1957: 360–368).
In the East especially, as the upper-class lawyers increased pressure to require law school training for admission to bar exams, resistance to exclusionary tactics was manifested by the founding of new schools. Thus the number of degree-conferring law schools increased from 102 in 1900 to 124 in 1910, 146 in 1920, and 190 in 1936. In 1936, only 94 of the 190 schools were approved by the ABA, and only half a dozen states required study in an ABA-approved school. The unapproved schools were largely (88 out of 96) night schools or mixed day and night schools, whereas most approved schools (75 out of 94) were full-time schools attached to regular universities. It was the night schools that expanded in response to educational requirements for practice: In 1890 there were 59 “day” and 10 “night” schools; in 1900, 79 and 25, respectively; in 1910, 79 and 45; in 1920, 80 and 62.
A continual battle was carried on against these “unqualified” schools, especially through efforts to make the requirements of the leading law schools into the legal requirements for admission to practice. The leading schools, in turn, were moving to solidify their ties to high-status groups through college degree prerequisites for admission. This process moved slowly. In 1890, only 4 out of 61 leading law schools had entrance requirements equivalent to those necessary for admission to the liberal arts colleges of their universities. Only after 1890, led by Harvard, did the most elite law schools begin to require a college degree before admission. As late as 1931, the average American lawyer had about 1 year of college and 2.25 years of law school or office training, but by the latter date the pattern was confirmed, and in later decades law school had been increasingly tied to the standard sequence of American education. Some 66% of all law students in the 1960s were attending full-time schools, most of which had college degree prerequisites, and most of the rest were in part-time schools with prerequisites approved by the ABA. Social class background is an important determinant of access, with prospective law students well above average in social class background of other college students; and the average social background rises with the academic selectivity of the law school attended (Hurst, 1950: 268, 281; Griswold, 1964: 57–59).
Industrialization or Cultural Conflict?
The movement to raise educational standards and to tie law practice into the sequence of higher education was part of a more general movement of class and status group conflict occurring in America in the late nineteenth century. The law reform movement derived from several of the component currents of this movement. Thus the founding of bar associations and their efforts to centralize and raise requirements for legal practice were directly connected with the WASP counterattack on the political machines and patrimonial practices that were based on immigrants and the working class generally. At the same time, the involvement of some lawyers in these machines and the apparent influx of immigrants (or at least immigrant-oriented men) into the legal profession threatened the group’s elite image. The influx of Jews in the major eastern cities was particularly feared. The campaign to raise entrance standards, and hence to make law practice more restrictive, was an effort to reassert traditionalistic upper-class and WASP monopoly over legal practice.
This interpretation is bolstered by an analysis of the recurrent outcries concerning “overcrowding in the bar” that have been heard from the late nineteenth century onward. Studies carried out in the 1930s indicated that lawyers’ services were used almost entirely by the wealthiest 13% of the population, and that the lower groups had considerable occasion to use lawyers’ services but could not afford them (Hurst, 1950: 311–316). Thus “overcrowding” could only be based on an upper-class or upper-middle-class perspective. Moreover, concentrations of large numbers of lawyers were found only in the large cities. It was here that the immigrant groups and their lawyers (often economically marginal) were found, but it was also the site of the most lucrative law practices—the large firms allied to big business. Thus it appears that the “overcrowding” issue, raised constantly by elite lawyers throughout a lengthy period, primarily reflects efforts at status closure within the profession.
The efforts to raise requirements moved rather slowly, since it was held back by American political decentralization and by the democratic traditions, which had made the legal profession relatively accessible in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. That it did move forward nevertheless was owing to a number of resources available to the upper-class lawyers. The rise of the national corporation, and hence of the very wealthy and high-status law firm, gave them a base from which to claim professional leadership. At the same time, schools were available that were long identified with the WASP elite, notably Harvard and Yale. Such schools, facing economic problems of their own, were happy to enter into an alliance of interest with the upper-class lawyers; connecting individuals like Simeon Baldwin, who was both a law professor and a corporation lawyer, were the initiators of organizations to make the standards of the elite schools into the standards of the profession.
The reason the strategy took so long to pay off, and indeed failed in the effort to completely restrict nonelite lawyers, was because of a weakness of the American education system for exerting monopolistic control. In the decentralized conditions of American government, and against a long tradition of founding schools and other cultural organizations, it was too easy to respond to educational requirements by founding new schools, especially the night schools that proliferated after 1890. The structure favored credential inflation rather than an immediately effective monopolization. The bar associations were thus forced to take action a second time. Efforts to have state laws declare certain schools unqualified were not generally successful, but the less direct tactic of requiring college study as a prerequisite for law study made headway. This was designed to favor the schools attached to the elite colleges; one of its effects was to attach law study more and more firmly to the sequence of higher education, not as an alternative to it.
It might be argued that the rise of the modern corporation and of government regulation has made legal practice more complex, and hence the old apprenticeship training was no longer adequate, and increasingly formal study was a functional necessity. Comparative evidence does not lend much support to this view, however. On the Continent, there are long-standing and highly rationalized legal systems based on university training and lacking the traditionalistic complexities of the Common Law, which have not produced any superiority in the rate of industrialization. In England, training that consisted of apprenticeship through the Inns of Court provided for legal “needs” throughout the complex changes of many centuries, on into the twentieth; we have noted that such “needs” are themselves the result of the power of lawyers to complicate the access of private citizens to government adjudication. For America, there are no studies available of the actual differences in skilled performance between those trained in schools versus those trained by on-the-job apprenticeship; the rise in educational requirement has made the latter group virtually unavailable for comparison, as well as probably attracting the more able persons into the more prestigious forms of preparation. Evidence from the 1920s shows that students trained in the more elite law schools are more likely to pass bar exams on their first try than those from schools with lower entrance requirements, who are in turn more likely to pass than those trained in offices. Nevertheless, a high proportion (87%) of all who attempt bar exams eventually pass (Hurst, 1950: 274). Moreover, there is no evidence that performance on bar exams is related to actual skill in practice; bar exams primarily reflect academic concerns and slight the practical skills that must be learned afterwards.
The history of corporation law suggests that innovations precede the education relating to the problem involved. The major role of lawyers in modern business history was in the modification of traditional restrictions on corporations and in the development of trusts and other legal instruments that advanced monopoly control in American industry. The first of these developments began in the 1830s and culminated in the 1889 New Jersey corporation law that permitted holding companies. The latter developed especially in the 1880s and 1890s. John D. Rockefeller’s lawyer, Samuel C. T. Dodd, devised the “trust” instrument in 1880, bringing about great monopolization during the decade and provoking the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890.12 The lawyers involved, generally educated at high-status liberal arts colleges, were legally trained in fairly traditionalistic methods and did their innovating based on practical experience. Moreover, the case method introduced by the reforming law schools was not particularly suited to the needs of modern business or government. In its effort to extract “scientific” principles, it concentrated on the appellate level to the exclusion of the actual working with legal cases, and until well into the twentieth century it concentrated on the most traditionalistic sectors of the law, ignoring newer developments, especially in the fields of administrative law (Hurst, 1950: 269–271; Harno, 1953: 137–140). Certainly much innovative legal work has been done during the institutional changes of modern society, but it appears to have been made possible largely through on-the-job experience, with schools lagging behind in teaching it. Thus the most important figure on the American bench during the period of industrialization, Justice Stephen Field of the California and United States Supreme Courts, devised the modern codes and principles of business law on the basis of a legal education that consisted entirely of apprenticeship in his brother’s law firm (McCurdy, 1976).13
The link between the educationally innovating Ivy League law schools and the elite Wall Street law firms, and the tie of both of these to positions of national government power in the cabinet and judiciary, appears to be primarily the result of their common status group composition. This link, strongly in evidence during the twentieth century, has roots reaching back at least to mid-nineteenth century when lawyers for emerging national business, like William H. Seward, were prominent as cabinet officers (Smigel, 1964: 4–12, 37–42, 72–74; Domhoff, 1967: 58–62, 84–114). The social linkage between the most elite schools and the powerful legal positions was crucial for the growth of educational requirements. It meant that success within the legal profession was associated with elite education, thus giving leverage for the raising of educational requirements, as well as setting a status ideal for lesser lawyers to emulate.
The effect of these processes was not to reestablish complete upper-class monopoly over law; the flexibility of the American educational system was too strong a defense against this. Nevertheless, enough pressure was exerted, both through legal requirements and through standards of elite law practice, to bring a steady rise in educational requirements, both in years of law school and in prior college preparation. The status struggle among lawyers thus contributed to the vertical extension of the American educational system. It also tended to keep the legal profession from splitting into high- and low-status segments, as in the barrister–solicitor split in England. However much informal distinction there might be among firms (or between firm lawyers and solo lawyers), or between high-status and low-status law schools, the profession stayed united, with differences based essentially on the total amount of schooling the individual received, both in and before law school. In law, as in other areas, American structure has fostered a school-oriented contest mobility system.
Engineers are the biggest group of professionals in modern societies, and the one professional group whose services are clearly required by industrialism. This is particularly so when we recognize that there is no sharp dividing line between engineers, technicians, and mechanics; it is this group, as a whole, that makes industrialism work. By comparison, doctors, dentists, and nurses simply provide consumption services that a wealthier populace can increasingly afford; lawyers, as a group, monopolize dispute settlement and administrative functions to the degree that their power permits; and teachers are in demand to the degree that the educational system itself is extensive. The call for these professions can vary considerably in different industrial societies; the need for a considerable body of engineers, however, is found in all.
Given the clear-cut importance of engineers above all other professions in industrial society, we might expect that engineering training would dominate the educational system. Indeed, it is plausible that an industrial society could operate with an educational system devoted almost entirely to engineering. This tends to be the case in the USSR, China, and other communist countries; in a less exclusive fashion, the French educational system gives special prominence to engineers. Moreover, there was a period in mid-nineteenth-century America when the existing educational system in America was under attack as vocationally useless, and its ability to provide nonvocational certification was weakened by the proliferation of colleges. Vocationally oriented educational programs centering on engineering were offered as an alternative, both at the high school and college levels. If purely technical demands had dominated, such schools should have become the center of the educational system, outranking other forms of education in prestige and attracting the bulk of the financial support and the most elite students. If Calvin Woodward’s high school version of engineering training (see Chapter 5) had been given strong support in the nineteenth-century—as it might have on grounds of sheer vocational efficiency, since it eliminated nontechnical preparatory training and provided the quickest path to technical skills—the entire edifice of higher education would likely have crumbled and the total length of high-level training in America greatly shortened.
But these consequences did not occur, as testimony to the importance of nontechnical factors in explaining the place of education in stratification. The vocationally irrelevant but high-status classical education system was not destroyed, but modified to permit the passage of large numbers of students from increasingly wider class origins. Threats to this system of cultural certification, especially in the form of vocationally relevant education of which engineering is the best example, were eventually incorporated into the sequence, thus becoming supports to it rather than rivals. The organization of professional engineering is as much a social phenomenon as a purely technical one, and status interests and conflicts among engineers have been the main forces that kept engineering from making a serious challenge to the nontechnical educational system and to the larger system of stratification by status group membership and financial and political resources.
Comparative Perspectives: French and English Models of Engineering
Historically, the occupation of engineer emerges from a variety of roles.14 At one level, predecessors included skilled artisans such as millwrights, stonemasons, blacksmiths, and clockmakers. At the opposite extreme were the high-status roles of the military officer or the government official, as found for example in the Roman Empire, who directed large numbers of men in building roads, bridges, and fortifications. In between these levels of power and status could be found the artist–architect and the master builder–construction gang boss. The man with technical skills relevant to large-scale operations thus occupied an ambiguous status between gentry and laborer, combining elements of master and servant. His actual status depended on historical conditions that determined the distribution of power, and hence the dividing lines between classes. The highest status of the technician–engineer in premodern society was probably in the merchant-dominated cities of Renaissance Italy; in this situation, the dividing line between skilled worker and boss was most ambiguous.
With the rise of industrialism, the value of the techniques at the disposal of the engineering expert was increased, and his claims for status among the higher ranks of society—among the order-givers rather than among the order-takers—became secure. But just how much power could be won on the basis of expertise remained a variable. In France, the engineer acquired an early foothold in the royal government in the seventeenth century: first as artillery officer and specialist in fortifications, later as builder of roads and public works in the civil administration. The first organized group of engineers and the first school of engineering anywhere in the world were thus established in France: the Corps Imperial du Génie (Military Engineering Corps) in 1672 and the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées (School of Bridges and Roads) in 1747. To be sure, the engineering officers were looked down upon by the aristocrats of the army and the legal guilds because they smacked too much of the status of workmen. Thus engineering posts were filled by commoners or by impoverished provincial aristocrats like Napoleon Bonaparte.
During the eighteenth century, the royal bureaucracy came increasingly to take over the actual administration of France from the aristocracy, and the characteristically French centralization was established. The Revolution of 1789 eliminated the hereditary aristocracy and the king and elevated the bureaucracy to preeminence. The process was further advanced by the accession to power of Napoleon in 1799. The major result was to abolish the classical, church-based university and replace it by a central engineering school, the Ecole Polytechnique, to train the administrators of France. Subsequent counterrevolutions and revolutions revived alternative forms of French education, including the law schools, but overall the position of engineers in French society has remained extremely high. Government posts are centrally controlled and largely filled at their higher levels by graduates of the Polytechnique and the other Grandes Ecoles: the Centrale and the Ecole des Mines (School of Mines). High positions in large-scale industry, itself organized in cartels with semiofficial status, are also the province of the technical elite. Thus technical education in France has come to virtually monopolize major command posts (Granick, 1960: 60–72; Crozier, 1964: 238–244, 252–258; Artz, 1966; Ben-David, 1971: 88–107).
A very different pattern developed in England. There the centralized government bureaucracy was relatively weak until well after the Industrial Revolution; the universities provided classical culture for a genteel elite. Until the nineteenth century, science was carried out largely by gentlemen-amateurs. In this context, engineers were essentially self-trained craftsmen. Brindley, Metcalf, Telford, Watt, Stephenson, and other leading engineers were men with little formal education. Engineering schools gradually developed by the twentieth century, but as low-prestige sectors of the educational system; even in 1961, only 22% of mechanical engineers were graduates (Gerstl and Hutton, 1966: 42, see also 6–13; Reader, 1966: 69–71, 118–126, 142–145). Throughout the nineteenth century, the pattern was one of relatively informal, self-acquired or apprenticeship-style engineering training for middle-stage careers in construction and industry; whereas the high-status educational institutions, pointedly stressing nonvocational education for gentlemen, fed into the positions of government power.
The centralized French model of a political–industrial engineering elite and the British model of informally trained engineers of modest status represent the polar types of the social organization of engineering in modern societies. Both of them are workable; neither can be called “functionally necessary.” Most other societies have adopted one or the other of these models—the French system most strongly imitated by the communist countries and the English system by its former colonies. Germany, whose model was imitated especially by Japan, represents a mixed form of engineering education. The German universities had already monopolized employment in the ranks of government officials by the late eighteenth century, but they trained only doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and teachers. A separate system of secondary and higher schools was set up for engineers to meet the demands of industry in the nineteenth century. These were of lower status than the universities, which looked down on them; hence the engineering schools recruited from a lower-class milieu and filled less elite positions in society. The German system thus came to represent a bifurcated educational system, with technical training as the lower branch in terms of power and prestige (Ben-David and Zloczower, 1962; Armytage, 1965: 76–93).
The position of American engineers has come to constitute a pattern all its own. In the mid-nineteenth century, the possibility of dominating the school system in the French style, if in more massive numbers (perhaps like the modern Russian system), might have seemed a likely possibility. The widespread popular attack on the vocational irrelevance of traditional education lent support in this direction. Instead, it has tended to become part of a greatly democratized version of the classical British system, following from a nonspecialized, nonvocationalized secondary education, and then taking higher education that has consistently moved closer to the status aims of traditional liberal arts schools. Among the leading engineering schools there has been a continual effort to avoid the low-status connotations of the purely technical education reflected in the status composition of its students. In recent years this has taken the form of moving elite engineering training toward the postgraduate level and introducing greater nonvocational elements at the undergraduate level. The American pattern, for all the talk of its vocational emphasis, is still the most massively nonvocational system of education in the modern world.
Origins of American Engineering
The first American engineers to emerge in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were builders of roads, bridges, canals, and other works of transport construction. They were a mixed group in origin. Some were artisans, trained as carpenters, blacksmiths, or clockmakers; others were merchants engaged in profitable new ventures in the first wave of American economic expansion; others were literate gentry, often lawyers or judges, who took an interest in publicly useful works and admired the accomplishments of the French and English builders of the time (Struik, 1962: 135–174). Virtually all acquired their skills informally. The early bridge and canal builders operated by trial and error, initially creating structures that were quite wasteful of materials. Unlike the artisans, the gentlemen engineers were classically educated, some of them in the colonial colleges, but they learned their engineering skills as a second form of education by their own practice or by the passing on of lore from other practitioners. Such skills as surveying were known among landowners of the period, in the same fashion as a craft passed on from one person to another, often within a family. For the more complex projects, such as the building of canals with systems of locks, American organizers made use of European skills, either by taking trips to visit the English practitioners or sometimes by hiring them to oversee American projects and to pass on advice.
The organization and financing of large projects fell to the wealthier classes, and they alone could afford travel abroad to acquire advanced techniques. It appears that once construction projects had become a thriving business and practical knowledge had begun to accumulate at a more advanced level than the original trial-and-error techniques, civil engineering began to be consolidated as an occupation of the upper rather than of the artisan classes. This trend was accentuated by the establishment of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1802. West Point was to train an elite of engineers; it was modeled on the French Ecole Polytechnique, founded a few years earlier in 1797. Thomas Jefferson, then president, regarded it as the beginning of a national university system to train a rationally organized, scientifically educated elite on the French model.
The effort to create a centralized system of elite selection failed under American conditions. Political decentralization, heightened by expansion westward, militated against the dominance of a single elite throughout American government, and the strong position of private education prevented the flow of federal funds to a single national institution, although West Point had an important effect on the American engineering profession (Struik, 1962: 311–316). After 1817, it was headed by Sylvanus Thayer, a gentleman officer who had been sent by President Madison to study at the Ecole Polytechnique. Thayer brought the original plan for the academy into full operation, introducing the French engineering curriculum and importing French instructors. Members of the Army Engineering Corps became the basis of the civil engineering profession in America. The government freely detached them to work for the railroads, which expanded in the decade after 1830, and it appears that virtually all railroads were built with the aid of engineers trained at West Point. In 1824, Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute (RPI) was founded by a wealthy New York landowner in direct imitation of the West Point model for producing the scientifically trained, elite engineer.
For many years, these two institutions were the only organized schools of civil engineering training. Founded in the tradition of the Polytechnique, they emphasized the ideal of engineering as an elite profession and resisted identification with other technicians who might lower their status. Even those civil engineers who were not graduates of these schools held the elitist view: They emphasized their gentry status and avoided anything smacking of manual labor and, to a degree, of commercialism as well. The nonmilitary engineer thus moved increasingly to an occupational stance of independent consultation or government employment (Calhoun, 1960). Their model for engineering looked back essentially to the eighteenth-century French official rather than forward to the commercial organizations of emerging American industry.
Mechanical engineering originated similarly. Its early practitioners comprised two groups: (a) carpenters, clockmakers, and other artisans, who developed their skill by experimenting with new forms of machinery; and (b) wealthy gentlemen, frequently possessing classical education, who ventured into promising new areas of business enterprise, such as the building of steam engines or the mass production of firearms and textiles, while acquiring the necessary technical skills in the process. For the early period, American industry depended heavily on European borrowing. The railroad locomotive was introduced by buying an English model, which was studied and used as a prototype for further developments. English mechanics were also imported directly; somewhat more frequently, American gentlemen would travel to England to meet the English inventors, and sometimes to France as well to visit the Polytechnique (Struik, 1962: 175–200, 303–334).
The latter forms of training were available exclusively to wealthy men, thus giving them an edge over the artisan engineers. Moreover, the importance of financial backing for engineering enterprises grew with their expansion of size during the early nineteenth century, and the wealthy gentlemen came to dominate the mechanical engineering field. Within this group, training came to take place by a sort of apprenticeship system of working in a shop where machines were made and improved. On the surface, it appeared that considerable equality prevailed in such shops, with sons of wealthy gentry working alongside sons of uncultivated mechanics; in the later controversy over engineering education, the leading mechanical engineers were to make much of egalitarianism and free opportunities for mobility in the early shops (Calvert, 1967: 3–27, 63–85).
But chances for mobility were not equal; the gentry moved much more rapidly into business partnership or into superintendent positions elsewhere, having learned their practical know-how from the mechanics, who were more likely to stay behind. The split between the mechanic and the engineer thus began to appear at an early date, based essentially on class background. That it did not grow sharp until the late nineteenth century was owing to a number of factors, including some real possibilities for upward mobility among mechanics into such positions as superintendents (if not as plant owners), and by an effort of engineer–businessmen to maintain an informal, paternalistic system of control over their valuable laborers.
The Struggle over Engineering Education
Status issues were crucial in determining the form of education and of professional organization that would come to prevail among professional engineers. The fact that engineering in America has not attained a strong professional organization even today can be traced to the multiple lines of status conflict among engineers and potential engineers in the nineteenth century. Five separate models of engineering education were put forward by competing factions:
1. The first half of the nineteenth century saw a vigorous movement of mechanics institutes (Struik, 1962: 266–271; Calvert, 1967: 29–40). Some commercial, others supported by wealthy benefactors, these institutes were designed for the artisan or workingman to acquire a more formal background in science and mathematics in order to advance as an engineer. Their emphasis was on upward mobility, and their clientele—at times a very large one—was drawn from the nongenteel classes. These institutes were a phenomenon of the period when working-class mechanics still had fair chances to rise to positions of command, and the close association with gentlemen who were learning their skills in the shops raised the mechanics’ hopes of higher status. After the Civil War, however, the hopes of mechanics to freely enter the engineering profession diminished. Trade union forms of organization, designed to ensure job security, began to gain popularity, and the mechanics institutes went into decline. Part of the failure of mechanics institutes may be attributed to the indifference or hostility of the genteel engineers for whom the status connotations of such training were detrimental to their own positions. Some such training schools survive even today in highly commercial forms; these have been quite ineffective in providing mobility opportunities, however, in competition with modern engineering schools styled on university lines.15
2. Another highly democratic effort in engineering education was the training school movement in the public high schools prominent in the late nineteenth century. As we have seen in the previous chapter, this movement drew its strength through a reaction to the practical uselessness of the classical education. The promise was to make high school—at the time not greatly distinguished in content from college—into the real center of the educational system as the place for the training of engineers. Indeed, the positions held by graduates of the St. Louis Training School around 1900 were very comparable to those held by graduates of the university-level engineering schools; both comprised an assortment of manufacturers, superintendents, and engineers on the one hand, and of assistants, draftsmen, and middle white-collar and technical employees on the other (Calvert, 1967: 149–150; Fisher, 1967: 77). Nevertheless, the high school level training schools never took hold against the hostility of nontechnical high school administrators and of the gentry engineers. As in the case of mechanics institutes, public training schools, despite their technical feasibility for nineteenth-century engineering requirements and their efficiency in eliminating extraneous teaching materials, were regarded primarily as a threat to the genteel status of the profession.
3. The high-status model of engineering education was the French Ecole Polytechnique, producing an elite of military officers and government officials. This was the model favored by the civil engineers and attempted at West Point and RPI. But the status aim embodied in the Polytechnique was too high to be attained under American conditions. American government, with its emphasis on autonomous local jurisdictions, was virtually the opposite of the centralized French government bureaucracy, and the close link between government and industry that made French engineers an elite of industrial managers as well as government officials was missing in America. Nevertheless, the civil engineers, as the earliest and best-educated section of engineering, had opportunities to take over the leadership of the entire engineering profession. The precedent established by the free assignment of West Point–trained army engineers to the railroads could conceivably be extended to industry as well.
But far from attempting to gain dominance over the emerging industrial society, American civil engineers resisted any such ties. Secure in their own genteel status and oriented toward an idealized European image of themselves, the civil engineers scorned commercial employment and mechanical engineering as well. West Point, Rensselaer, and other schools of engineering long slighted the teaching of mechanical engineering, forcing such education to be established elsewhere (Calvert, 1967: 44–45, 197–224). As late as 1903, civil engineers refused to join with the professional organizations of mechanical, mining, and electrical engineers in a common engineering association building in New York. The Polytechnique model, instead of being extended, was sharply constricted to the civil engineering profession.
4. The leading mechanical engineers had their own version of high-status education: the informal system of apprenticeship in the shops of machine manufacturers. This “shop culture,” as Calvert has termed it, emphasized a career of gentlemanly ideals: personal relationships rather than formal or bureaucratic procedures, labor paternalism, and an unspecialized role combining capacities for creative innovation with the independence of the business owner. If the civil engineers invoked the ideal of the Napoleonic officer, mechanical engineers invoked the ideal of the gentleman of the Thomas Jefferson type—a man of knowledge and affairs, capable of any task.
The leading mechanical engineers were wealthy businessmen. When the profession finally formalized itself in 1880 as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), manufacturers were its leading segment. As a professional organization, they were remarkably free from the usual interest of such organizations, opposing the development of engineering schools, licensing requirements, and the establishment of legal standards of performance (Calvert, 1967: 63–85, 107–139). The ASME operated essentially as a club for the wealthy leaders of the “shop culture.” It made little effort to include the increasing numbers of engineers, especially those employed in lower positions of large bureaucracies. Its opposition to licensing and legal standards reflected the commercial interests of its members as well as its concern with keeping the profession informal. Since most were involved in the sale of machinery, they felt no need for external regulations. Their resistance to licensing was part of their battle against formal engineering schools, for licensing procedures eventually take on the tone of school exams and tend to move toward formal educational requirements. The slow rise of schools of mechanical engineering was, in large part, a result of the opposition of this group.
5. Finally, there were the university-level schools of mechanical engineering. Initial efforts to train engineers for industrial employment foundered because of a variety of opposition: the refusal of the civil engineering schools to include mechanical engineering in the curriculum; the denial of its importance by the high-status group of mechanical engineers; and the hostility of the traditional colleges to a practical curriculum (Calvert, 1967: 43–62, 87–105). The last fear was particularly acute because of the enormous failure rate among colleges and the growing tone of criticism in the mid-nineteenth century of the uselessness of the classical curriculum. Only after the passage of the federal Morrill Act in 1862 (i.e., during the period of patriotic enthusiasm of the early period of the Civil War) did mechanical engineering schools begin to appear. The land-grant aids of the Morrill Act went primarily for setting up state universities. In the East, some of this was acquired by new private schools such as Cornell (founded in 1871) and M.I.T. (1865). Yet even the land-grant colleges, provisioned under the ideology of providing practical training in mechanical engineering and agriculture, were under constant pressure to evolve into imitations of the high-status universities, emphasizing traditional studies and scholarship (Jencks and Riesman, 1968: 224–230). Training in scientific agriculture, although important for gaining political support, was scarcely implemented until well into the twentieth century. Engineering as well tended to be neglected by university administrators eager to raise the social and scholarly status of their institutions.
Against these obstacles, mechanical engineering education grew slowly. The major source of teachers was former navy engineers. Such men were available in part because of declining military opportunities after the Civil War, in part because of antagonism toward them on the part of the aristocratic, regular navy officers, who looked down upon an occupation that included a great many mechanics recruited during the wartime needs for boiler experts (Calvert, 1967: 245–261). These teachers represented a bureaucratic rather than an entrepreneurial or genteel image of the engineering profession. The nature of the university engineering training as well, and the antagonism of the small engineering shops to such education, fitted its graduates for employment primarily in the emerging business corporations. The traditional mechanical engineering elite, defending their own version of informal training, pointedly called attention to the nonelite nature of many graduate careers. Many became draftsmen, with typical careers within the middle ranges of bureaucratic hierarchy. Electrical engineers, in particular, were likely to be hired by two major corporations—Westinghouse and General Electric. Relatively fewer of the university-trained engineers became entrepreneurs or executives, although engineering was to become an important new path upward within new corporations during the twentieth century.16
Modern American Engineering
Throughout the nineteenth century, then, American engineering failed to achieve either a united profession or a widely accepted system of education. These failures did not prevent the United States from experiencing tremendous economic growth, attaining a position of world leadership by World War I. What it did prevent was the dominance of an engineering elite over American industry or over the American educational system. Just as ethnic conflicts have split the American working class, analogous conflicts among rival status groups within engineering (some based on class origins, others perhaps on ethnicity) have kept a strong occupational community from emerging to monopolize practice and control the routes to organizational power. As bureaucratic organizations came to dominate American industry, the “shop culture” and its genteel upholders gradually disappeared or became transformed into bureaucrats themselves. The more popularly oriented forms of engineering education—the mechanics institute and the training schools—failed from their fatal trait of low-status connotations. But the Polytechnique ideal, the dominance of the pure technical culture and its carriers, was not to prevail either.
By 1910, the university-level engineering schools were firmly established, feeding their graduates to the bureaucratic sectors of industry. This education, however, never achieved elite status, nor did it uphold the ideal of a purely scientific and technical education as a substitute for the genteel but vocationally useless liberal arts curriculum. Its students tended to be recruited from among the lower middle class and ethnic minorities, and to represent a type of culture—the nongenteel, nonsociable, technical specialists (in undergraduate parlance, “the greasy grind”)—that could not compete with the traditionally high-status professions (medicine, law, and liberal arts teaching) and their upper-middle-class students.17 Well aware of their status problems, the engineering teachers made an effort to tie themselves to the status of the traditional education system. From the early period, with the exception of occasional experiments with acceleration movements, leading engineering schools moved to model themselves on the classical colleges in all external particulars, including numbers of years of study and admissions requirements, stressing graduation from a liberal arts high school, with preparation in English and history rather than strictly in science (Calvert, 1967: 76–77; Jencks and Riesman, 1968: 229).
Engineering thus moved into the twentieth century, no longer a threat to the main body of American education: the unitary system of preparation in a modified liberal arts curriculum and branching off from the traditional liberal arts college. Indeed, there have been constant efforts by leaders of the engineering profession to upgrade its status, not by emphasizing its technical qualities but by attempting to incorporate more of the high-status culture of liberal arts. In 1890, the president of the ASME, a representative of the wealthy business engineering group, argued against purely vocational education on the grounds that engineers should be able to “meet wealthy and cultivated clients upon their own levels; to excel them, if anything, in the intelligent appreciation of their mutual affairs and in the amenities of social intercourse [Calvert, 1967: 83].”
A Carnegie Foundation report in 1918 criticized the quality of engineering schools (Mann, 1918). In 1929, a group of professional leaders centered in the high-status engineering schools published the Wickenden Report, yet another effort to do for engineering what the Flexner Report had done to raise the status of the medical profession.18 The Wickenden Report again criticized the narrow vocationalism of much of engineering education and argued for greater inclusion of liberal arts preparation in the curriculum, with the ideal of translating education into an exclusively postgraduate training as in the more prominent schools of medicine and law. (Unlike medical reform, status and technical interests here pushed in opposite directions.) This was followed by the organization of foundations to enforce these standards through state licensing laws and accreditation of engineering schools.
Implementation of such proposals has been slow. The leading engineering schools, especially those attached to the high-status liberal arts colleges, have gradually introduced more nonengineering courses into the curriculum. Graduate degrees in engineering have indeed risen. As compared with the engineers of 1900, virtually none of whom had M.A.s or Ph.D.s, of the cohort graduating during the 1950s, 13% had M.A.s and 1.7% had Ph.D.s; of the 1965 cohort, 24% had M.A.s and 4% Ph.D.s.19 Nevertheless, engineering has continued to recruit most heavily from among the upwardly mobile, ethnic minority working class and lower middle class for whom a narrow vocational emphasis rather than a training in high culture was the primary aim. For those of lower social origin, a position as a technical specialist in the middle ranks of a bureaucratic organization is an acceptable goal, although it may not be for the upper-middle-class person seeking elite status.
The engineering profession and its related educational system thus remain full of strain. Elite status pretensions still act to push educational requirements up and to make them less narrowly technical. This process has been aided, at least in part, by the rapid rise in the number of students in the twentieth century, which has gradually pushed up educational requirements for employment in engineering and made a graduate degree useful for staying one step above the mass. Nevertheless, advanced degrees—especially Ph.D.s—are training primarily in research, and their holders tend to advance in research jobs rather than in the command hierarchy of organizations (Perrucci and Gerstl, 1969: 131, 135). Engineering students from lower economic backgrounds, less able to afford lengthier education and less attracted to the cultural status values of education for its own sake, are a strong counterforce, especially at the lower-status engineering schools.
Employers are a third element in the struggle over requirements. They have resisted the tendency to upgrade all engineers through lengthening training and periodically have called for separate programs to train technicians who do not pose the promotion and status pressures of the engineers (Perrucci and Gerstl, 1969: 281–284). Engineers generally have resisted such proposals, perhaps from a consciousness of their relatively weak professional organization independent of business employment, and from reluctance to have many of their employment opportunities frozen at lower levels. Technicians do not always constitute a clearly separate group, however, but are often drawn from engineering students who have not yet finished their degrees.20 Thus, not only has engineering failed to create a major challenge or split in the unified status hierarchy of American education, but even within the profession, technicians tend to be distinguished from engineers through quantitative differences in achievement within the school system, not through differences in kind of training. In engineering, as elsewhere in the American occupational structure, the credential market pushes for the continued elaboration of vertical distinctions.
From a theoretical viewpoint, the formation of professions is determined by the same general principles that govern the formation of any kind of consciousness community. The strong professions are merely a particular kind of occupation, one that has an especially distinctive culture and self-conscious organization. And occupations in general exhibit the same range of variation in cohesiveness and power as the cultural communities that are more conventionally studied as leisure status groups made up of friends, families, and religious and ethnic memberships. A truly general theory of group formation would apply to both the occupational and status group realms (and indeed would show a good deal of their interpenetration). Such a theory would give us the conditions determining how many groups would be formed, how strongly organized each would be, whether they would be local or extensive, with strong or weak boundaries, and—in large part as the result of the preceding—what relationships of domination and subordination would exist among them.
We do not have such a full-fledged theory at present. But it seems clear that a major determinant of the numbers and characteristics of groups is the form of cultural production that exists. It is culture—the symbolic reflections upon and communications about the conditions of daily life, and the more abstract transformations and distortions of these experiences that can be symbolically created—that is the medium for conversations and other personal exchanges, and it is out of such exchanges that groups are formed and various identities and states of self-consciousness are generated. Thus culture is the crucial vehicle for the organization of the struggle over economic goods (as well as any other goods), and for the division of productive labor into distinctive occupations. As argued in Chapter 3, cultural organization shapes the class struggle at one of its most crucial points: the formation of various degrees of property in the form of occupational “positions.”
The history of the professions, then, is especially revealing because it shows us the conditions that have produced some of the most striking variations in the formation of occupational groups and positional property. The conditions are very much like those that produce ethnic groups.21 That is to say, the conditions of everyday life in a particular historical time and place generate a distinctive culture, and hence the basis for interacting as a group or set of groups. In the case of ethnic groups, a crucial point occurs when the group moves to a new situation; it will maintain a group identity only if there are means of encapsulating its historical culture, by enforcing group boundaries (whether from within or without), and often by the explicit, formal reproduction of its culture by specialized agencies. In the case of occupational groups, similarly, the deliberate encapsulation of a historical identity is crucial for a strong and self-conscious organization. Thus we may expect that not only will the strongest occupational communities be the most culturally traditional ones, but also that these occupations will place the strongest reliance on the formal and specialized reproduction of culture.
It is not surprising, from a theoretical viewpoint, that the history of the professions is so much entwined with the history of education, or that both of these are entwined with the history of ethnic conflicts and with the shifting patterns of politics. The difference between centralized and decentralized states plays a large part in the volatility of cultural markets, thus having an indirect effect upon the formation of occupational communities, as well as a direct effect through state intervention in legally shaping positional property. And the transformation of the United States from a near monoethnic to a highly multiethnic society has had crucial effects on its occupational structure, both indirectly and directly. In overviewing the factors that have shaped the professions into their distinctive forms in modern America, we are summarizing the conditions that have given this society its distinctive form of economic domination.
The historical process by which medicine, law, and engineering have acquired their identities is very revealing in this respect. Medicine has always emphasized its ritual procedures and its self-idealization. Behind the modern “bedside manner” stands a long tradition, not only of making oneself culturally acceptable to the dignified upper class, but also of taking a priestly role toward clients. During the long majority of medical history when no practical cures existed, ritual manipulation and its attendant secrecy and mystification were the sine qua non of the occupation’s existence. Western medicine branched off from the religious studies of the medieval university, and for a long period doctors were a special type of clergyman.22 Pursuing the medical tradition back to antiquity, we find the religious cult of the followers of the demigod, Hippocrates; behind this is the tradition of the shaman, a role from which medicine, divination, and priestcraft all developed. Physicians thus have an unbroken tradition of emphasizing ritual exclusion for the purposes of occupational impressiveness. Lawyers come from a more secular tradition, although the monopoly of the church over medieval education gave European lawyers their first resources toward a powerful group status. Medicine and law both acquired their core occupational cultures in the Middle Ages, based on the experience of literate groups with access to traditional texts, in a society in which the ruling aristocracy was illiterate. The modern organization of elite doctors emerged as the university-trained group that specialized in ritually treating the wealthy aristocrats in times of illness; lawyers emerged as the group that specialized in oral arguments and written texts surrounding government administration, first of all in the area of justice.
These occupations emerged with high-status cultures, both by virtue of their original access to the sacred books and institutional charisma of religious education and by virtue of their association with an upper-class clientele. In contrast, engineers have a dual occupational origin: the all-around skills of the gentleman-entrepreneur or administrator, and the technical lore of skilled laborers. Neither had any religious sanction, although the former was connected with the gentry class (nevertheless, in the prevailing tone of aristocratic society, engineering was not considered to be a very honored side of its activities). The skilled laborer side of engineering proved an even more serious embarrassment. Medicine actually has had a parallel plebeian group, that is, pharmacists, midwives, and barber-surgeons—indeed, all those who had some actual practical skills rather than mere Galenic theory. But the very capacity of the book-trained elite to define themselves as alone “practicing medicine” is an indication of the power of their ritual resources, above all in its influence upon the licensing power of the state. By comparison, engineers’ cultural heritage has always contained an ambiguity based on the difficulty in separating its two internal components, and hence their ability to act as a cohesive group in support of their interests was much lower. Engineers thus turn out to be the most occupationally assimilative of any profession: Its higher-level segment tends to merge with that of managers in general, its lower group into the class of skilled workmen.
Moreover, engineers have an ironic weakness in comparison with doctors and lawyers. The strongest cultural resources for the formation of a dominant group are those that involve a great deal of ritual impressiveness, especially in situations of high emotional stress. Engineers, however, deal with relatively uncontroversial and unemotional tasks, and hence lack a culture that is politically and morally impressive. Even more ironically, engineers and technicians suffer from the very successfulness of their techniques. The outcomes of their work are quite reliable, and hence even though outsiders may not always be able to judge the processes by which they work, they can control such technical employees by fairly simple judgments of work completed. The strength of doctors and lawyers vis-à-vis their clients, on the other hand, is precisely in the fact that their cures or legal maneuvers are not necessarily efficacious, and hence they are held much less accountable for their failures. Engineers’ and technicians’ work is productive labor; that of doctors and lawyers is primarily political labor. The one produces real outcomes; the other tends to manipulate appearances and beliefs.23 It is the very reliability of the productive realm that makes it relatively unrewarding, even for its most skilled practitioners, compared to the unpredictability and mystification of the political realm.
For medicine, the old cultural resources have remained salient throughout most of its history. Technically efficacious cures (in some but not all areas) emerging in the late nineteenth century have not eliminated the advantages of the older status idealization and monopolistic community closure; the older resources have been used to claim a monopoly on the new technical skills themselves. There was a crisis period in the American medical profession, however, during the early nineteenth century, when political decentralization through western expansion removed its political support for enforcing monopolization, and the rise of a new class of consumers began to call forth a diverse and uncontrolled market for medical services. We have seen how a number of auxiliary resources and alliances came to the rescue of the traditional medical organization, but it was nip and tuck for awhile, and one might well imagine that without the cultural conflicts of the later immigration period, medicine in America might have evolved into a much more economically modest and market-responsive occupational sector, little differentiated from the sale of other services.
Politics is crucial for the survival and prosperity of professions, above all through the power of the state in licensing their monopolies. Lawyers are in a particularly good position, since they are tied to the state more intimately than any other occupation except government employees and politicians. But the power of these latter groups is mediated by other interest groups outside the state, whereas lawyers claim to be esoteric specialists in the mediation process itself. Lawyers have the resources to perpetuate their distinctive culture, their apparently intrinsic skills; in the medieval tradition, this has meant to keep the procedures of legal argument and decision so complex and esoteric as to monopolize the channels of communication with judicial powers.24
By the same token, the strength of the legal guild is immediately affected by changes in the structure of political power. In medieval Europe, decentralized conditions favoring and institutionalizing the powers of the independent aristocracy vis-à-vis the king—including the archaic institution of the collegial courts themselves—made the lawyers a self-perpetuating status group. In contrast, the profession did not emerge at all in the long-centralized state of China, where laws remained part of the diffuse culture of all educated officials. Similarly, the rise of strong centralized bureaucracies to administer the continental European states tended to assimilate lawyers to the category of governmental administrators in general. In England, on the other hand, the balanced struggle between aristocracy and crown gave the lawyers, as intermediaries, many opportunities to elaborate the distinctiveness of their occupational culture (the Common Law) and the scope of their powers. The decentralization of government in America favored the continuation of this structure, although westward expansion in the nineteenth century and political democratization for a time diluted the occupational culture and threatened to assimilate the occupation to the larger politically mobilized populace generally. But the struggle against alien immigrant groups and the rise of the large, nationally centralized corporations toward the end of the century began to turn back this tide, giving elite lawyers other power resources and helping reestablish the balance between centralized and decentralized authority that most favors the power of lawyers.
With regard to the status of engineers, the increased economic significance of their skills in contributing to industrialization has continued to be offset by the split between the managerial and skilled labor aspects of the profession. Where political conditions have favored the former, the result has been an elite profession, as in the successful opposition of technically trained French administrators to the nonpractical aristocrats of the Old Regime. An even more extreme case is the Soviet Union, where political ideology has given engineers (along with specialists in political ideology, the equivalent of political priests trained in the ideological school system) special political significance, displacing all other professional competitors (and reducing lawyers to virtual insignificance). In England and America, however, the two sides of the occupational culture have remained in uneasy symbiosis, leaving engineering the least unified, and hence least powerful, of the major modern professions. The conflict between the subgroups of American engineering mined its apparent opportunity to displace the traditional university culture when the latter came under severe attack in the middle of the nineteenth century. With the bureaucratization of employment in the early twentieth century, the gentry ideal of the nineteenth-century engineer virtually disappeared, hastened by the influx of alien ethnic groups into engineering. At the same time, the last-ditch effort to tie engineering to elite culture, via incorporation in the standard educational sequence, tended to cut its earlier direct ties to the culture and personal circles of workingmen. The result was to produce a more diffuse engineering culture, held together primarily by educational credentials of moderate status value. The split between higher-status engineers (management-oriented) and lower-status engineers (technicians) has continued, but in a more graduated form, based on how far one has gone in the educational sequence.
The larger historical process whereby earlier organizational and cultural resources are carried over and help mold new situations is well illustrated by the professions. The shape of modern American medicine, law, and engineering clearly shows the marks of their origins and of the successive transformations along the way. Above all, in their embeddedness in a lengthy educational sequence (which essentially precedes the actual learning of practical skills, especially in the cases of medicine and law), we find that the ontogeny of the modern individual’s professional career recapitulates the phylogeny of its monopolistic status.
The main effects of a decentralized situation of status group stratification have been in the relative salience and spread of cultural distinctions. Multiethnic societies usually have a history of cultural conflict and emulation, with a tendency to extend cultural distinctions once marking off the elite into a lengthy hierarchy of cultural steps throughout society. Monoethnic societies are culturally stratified in terms of a simpler distinction between the elite and the masses; without an elaborate culture hierarchy throughout, class domination operates much more transparently.
The occupational equivalent of a multiethnic society is one containing strong autonomous professional communities. The analogy to diffuse cultural emulation and cultural hierarchy is an emphasis on education, especially in the lengthy hierarchic form that has been referred to as a “contest mobility” system. This is what we find in the United States of the twentieth century, following upon the consolidation of the professions around the turn of the century. We find the elaboration of a gradually lengthening educational sequence, with no sharp dividing point between elite and nonelite credentials, but a constant tendency to upgrade requirements relative to those of occupations below and to the numbers of aspirants. Professions have attached themselves vertically to the end of this sequence, requiring general cultural respectability for entrance into their training (rather than specific technical preparation). Internally, the professions add on further specialized requirements at the end of the common professional training period, thus extending the contest mobility system within their own ranks.
The model of professional organization has been widely emulated outside of the traditional professional occupations. In America this is found to an extent not experienced elsewhere in the industrial world. The elaboration of educational credentials, licensing procedures, and other formally monopolistic structures is found not only among dentists, librarians, and teachers, but also spreads to accountants, medical technicians, morticians, social workers, and business administrators, and into the traditional skilled crafts of the construction and household repairs occupations. The extension of monopolistic controls through government licensing is often justified by the same “altruistic” ideals as in the case of the traditional professions; thus campaigns to protect the consumer in such areas as auto repairs result in licensing requirements that decrease competition and monopolize entry to the occupation.
The same conditions that favored the elite professions—decentralized politics and multiple ethnic competition—may be seen operating here in the mobilization of occupational communities of all sorts to secure licensing and other monopolistic advantages from the state legislatures in the early years of the twentieth century. Labor unions did not initially share in this, above all because of their conflict with the interest groups closer to political power; since finally receiving government sanction in the 1930s, however, unions have not tended to act as pan-working-class—“assimilative”—organizations; the tendency has been to break up more and more into protective associations for the incumbents (often ethnic enclaves) of particular occupations. Through this process, occupational structures come more and more to resemble the closed guilds of medieval Europe, themselves the products of a situation of political decentralization and ethnic multiplicity.
America is surely the most capitalistic society in the world today, and has been so since at least the end of the last century. This feature is not accidental. For capitalism is above all the predominance of the private business enterprise over centralized state economic control and the elaboration of mechanisms for establishing and controlling a market in the hands of private interests. In numerous ways, the ethnic conflicts and political decentralization of America have contributed to this pattern to a degree not found elsewhere in the industrial world.
Organized labor, which elsewhere has lent its political weight toward some version of socialism (often in alliance with traditionalistic statist interests), has not had this effect in America. During the initial period of industrialization and its accompanying class conflicts, American labor was ideologically socialist but also heavily identified with immigrant ethnic blocs. The class conflicts of the time became shaped by a crusade for ethnic cultural domination as Anglo-Protestant America mobilized its resources to crush alien ethnic organization. Although by no means all of the Protestants were a single economic interest bloc, the central position of business interests in their cultural alliance meant that these were the interests most favored; henceforth, an antisocialist stance and “American” cultural identity became virtually synonymous. The same period saw the consolidation of professional associations as part of these ethnic conflicts; with their delegated state powers for self-regulation, they became little private governments, controlling their own sources of economic privilege and thus splitting up (and making more invisible) the targets for any reform of the economic order and bolstering a privileged, upper middle class alongside the national upper class. The elaboration of the school system, under the impetus of this conflict, and the establishment of educational credentials for employment, especially in the wealthiest corporations, has further disguised the means of domination and turned the class struggle into efforts of innumerable small occupational groups to gain control over their own positional property.
In the 1930s, when unions finally achieved political recognition and support, they did so in a situation in which the prevailing pattern was private bargaining against particular industrial enclaves rather than politically oriented class action. Unions became the local preserves of particular ethnic groups—especially the crafts unions, borrowing their legal structure from the same legislation that favored autonomous professions—and hence interethnic conflict within the working class has fragmented European-style class unity. Late-mobilizing ethnic groups, such as blacks and Latin Americans, have found their economic interests blocked by other ethnic working-class groups and have thus fought for their own economic enclaves, especially within government employment.
The growth of governmental regulatory agencies since the New Deal has not shifted the overall balance of power greatly. It has produced no shift toward a European-style confrontation between a unified, working-class party pushing for socialist-style controls and a united party of big business. American parties remain primarily ethnic coalitions, loosely organizing a mass of private group interests; their main legislative achievements involve setting aside protected economic enclaves for their groups. One should not be deceived by the rhetoric of laissez faire used by many conservatives and the rhetoric of regulation in the “public interest” by many liberals. Both sides fight for government support of particular monopolies and privileges, with the conservatives seeking these for business groups, the liberals for particular (usually ethnic) labor groups, government employees, and professions. It is not surprising, then, that liberals and conservatives find it so easy to compromise on particular pieces of legislation, since both favor the same pattern: government charters for the protection of private economic enclaves.
Most American government activity toward business has consisted of granting various rights for private self-regulation and appropriation of opportunities. On the local level, this takes the form of granting licenses and franchises to operate liquor stores or taverns, legal, medical and quasi-medical services, repair services, construction, crafts, insurance, real estate brokerages, banks, and other financial institutions. Although much of this has not been investigated in detail, we can surmise from studies of professions that the rhetoric of “protecting the public interest” that has justified this regulatory activity is mainly a dissimulative ideology, and that the activity serves the economic interests of the groups involved. For the “regulated” group (which usually is delegated the power of self-regulation by its most formally organized sector), this means monopolization of a particular area of business, reduction of competition, and often a form of price fixing. For the politicians who pass such legislation, there are payoffs in the form of having created an area of patronage under their disposal, often involving quasi-legal or illegal contributions (or at least political support) to procure licenses. Insofar as such regulative activities are sponsored more heavily by liberal politicians, it seems primarily because these are the types of small monopolies that can be sought by the ethnic minorities they represent.
The same activities may be seen on a grander scale at the federal level: not only the licensing of radio and television stations, airlines, drug sales (usually under prodding from interested medical lobbies), and international trade, but especially indirect protection of favored industries (through taxation and tariffs) and direct protection in the form of government purchases (in military expenditures, in “foreign aid” purchased from American producers, and in price supports for large agricultural businesses). The rhetoric of “public interest” involved in such regulatory activities does not mirror the actual pattern of monopolization, patronage bargaining, and market controls involved.
From a more sociological viewpoint, however, there is a certain appropriateness in this terminology. It is no accident that professions, the most privileged and monopolistic of occupations, should define themselves in altruistic terms, and that at least a certain aspect of this should be convincing. For moral categories refer to the preeminence of the community over the individual, and professions are above all occupational communities. Their ideology reflects reality in the sense that individual practitioners are supposed to subordinate all self-seeking that conflicts with the general interests of other practitioners. Since we commonly miss the difference between private communities and the larger community of the whole populace, it is easy for the rhetoric of altruistic dedication to the former to slide over into an appearance of altruism toward the latter. The same conceptual trick is played by the rhetoric of justifying governmental regulation, and in a double sense. Monopolies are generally given to groups rather than to individuals; thus the very fact that it is the government—which seems to represent the entire community—that grants the monopoly, seems to indicate that the whole population is acting to enforce altruistic standards on one of its parts. But the governments of America do not represent the community as a whole; rather they represent the most mobilized interest communities within it, and the political representatives bargain among themselves to transfer certain governmental powers to private groups to make their private community structure even stronger. The ongoing process of reform in America, as different private groups enter the bargaining, only serves to make private property interests ever more strongly entrenched. American capitalism permeates not only the upper reaches of the corporate economy, but much of the occupational structure as well.
Once everything is said and done about these differences in historical developments, modern capitalism prospers equally and manifests essentially identical economic traits under legal systems containing rules and institutions which considerably differ from each other, at least from the juridical point of view…. Indeed, we may say that the legal systems under which modern capitalism has been prospering differ profoundly from each other even in their ultimate principles of formal structure.