Greedy Institutions

LEWIS A. COSER. Greedy Institutions: Patterns of Undivided Commitment. Pp. iv, 166. New York: The Free Press, 1974. $7.95.

It is probably germane to report that when I agreed to review this book I expected it to be a higher level Vance Packard study of advertising and/or consumerism. But, although Coser is clear enough about what he wants to pioneer here in the sociology of politics, to this humanist observer he has just barely turned over a fresh sod. The term "greedy," indeed, is a key to more than one of Coser's intentions. Inasmuch as sociology, by the lack of virtue of its median prose, has long since displaced nineteenth century economics as the dreariest of sciences, the president-elect of the ASA apparently wants to initiate a counterrevolution in the prose of his craft.

"Greedy," as we are reminded to the point of wondering whether we are regarded as thick by the writer, is used metaphorically, to indict, really, institutions which demand too much of the private lives of their functionaries. Coser is explicitly polemical about this: there are worse things in the modern (and ancient) world than your Durkheims have ever dreamed of in their philosophies of anomie: "While I share with these modish critics their preoccupation with the quality of our lives, I feel obliged nevertheless to point out that attempts to create a 'wholeness' of social involvement might, if unchecked, eventuate in restrictions of individual freedom considerably more damaging to the human spirit than modern fragmentation and segmentation" (pp. 17- 18). And greedy is also a spritzy word, a sociologist as it were, aspiring to poetry.

After an introductory overview of the concept of the greedy institution, Coser divides his examples into three parts: serving the ruler (the political functions of eunuchdom, alien Jews and Christian renegades serving alien powers, and the royal mistresses as instruments of rule); serving the public (the servant and the captive house-wife); and serving the collective (sects and sectarians, militant collectives-- Jesuits, and Leninists, sexual repression in Utopias, and the function of sacerdotal celibacy).

The first thing one must be impressed by here is the tremendous range and disparateness of the subjects. When social scientists really do see what is functionally similar in antipodally diverse human milieux, they are of great help to professional humanists as well as general observers trying to place themselves better in a rapidly shifting social landscape. (Leo Lowenthal and Marjorie Fiske's seminal essay, "Art and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century England," has been such a siting in my own teaching of literature, for example.)

One is less convinced by Coser. For a start, the data--mainly culled from secondary sources which were of uneven validity to begin with--are spotty. If a humanist tried to fashion a literary hypothesis from as few poems as Coser has mistresses in chapter four, he'd be hooted down. Still we know that sexuality has a heavy status component, and it is a priori that the class origins of a mistress would introduce a differential into her relationships with the king and his retainers.

But, needless to say, sociology has made a point that a priorisms are precisely what it wants to displace with rigorously observed data theoretically organized. Coser's examples tantalize; they don't convince. On the other hand, in his chapter on domestic servants, I had the impression it must have been written out of reading nineteenth century British novels. One can't ask where did he see that kind of servant come from, since the genus has disappeared except for us-middle class people who use blacks and students to do our less clean work. That chapter in fact seems more a foil for the one which follows on the housewife who by and large seems to know where she's going anyway, unless she's one of Herbert Gans' blue collars, in which case she seems imperviously content in the serfdoms that seem intolerable to the better educated.

It is not these chapters, however topical they appear to be, that establish the interest of this book or the new discipline Coser would inaugurate. One could retitle the remaining chapters with a frivolous title, All I Wanted to Say about the Function of SEX in Political Institutions but was Afraid to use that Three Letter Word in Doing So. Here the humanist observer must note that truth in sociology seems to be polarized between two extremes: ritual apologies for having to force readers to slog through the obvious because Empiricism demands that we not make reality flashy when it is in fact grubby, even obviously so, this sort constituting the bulk of sociological truths; and a tiny lode at the other extreme (one expects that sociologists live from day to day in search of such epiphanies), a truth that contradicts common sense.

The big contradiction of this book is that promiscuity and celibacy are the very same under their very different skins, functionally. In short, scratch a Jesuit priest and a randy Leninist and beneath the epidermis one finds the same obsequious soul-seeking total commitment to similarly greedy institutions. Since Coser has brought up the Jesuits I'm tempted to employ a long-discarded aphorism they taught me in metaphysics class: Quis nimis probat nihil probat--"Who proves too much proves nothing."

Surely, there is some crucial difference in function between a Jesuit order in which men voluntarily gave up dyadic (ugh) sex to embrace secular knowledge for the purposes of the Counter-reformation and Leninist revolutionaries who coupled freely through the NEP period to be better able to start and consolidate a secular Revolution with chiliastic overtones. If it is true, that to couple or not to couple (nobody after all gives up sexual drives but rather rechannels them) is the same thing functionally within greedy institutions, then what have we learned about greedy institutions? That sexuality is not important?

Manifestly not, since the covert (why does it remain covert?) theme of the book is that a principal task of all power-especially monolithic power-is that it must control sexual energies which have a strong potential for privatizing experience, for engendering disloyalty. It didn't take this book to make that truism evident. That promiscuity or. celibacy are both valid human options? I doubt that Coser implies that here although a humane sociology of politics would in my judgment establish precisely that multi-valent posture.

Finally, one has the feeling closing this book like that felt finishing early McLuhan, for example, The Gutenberg Galaxy. One is grateful for Coser's synoptic searching, introducing one to fascinating bypaths on the human journey, especially in this case the material on eunuchs and royal mistresses. Humanists complain so often about the lack of historical dimension in sociological studies that it would be churlish not to be enthusiastic about this in-creased access to other times, other places.

But as with McLuhan, one is more stimulated than impressed intellectually. And, since Coser clearly wants to remove the incubus of under-readability from the sociological canon, it is sad but necessary to give him no more than a D+ in the prose department. "Socialists attempted to construct a Gemeinschaft of like-minded antagonists of the capitalist order who endeavored in their dissent from its guiding assumptions to embody in their lives ideas and ideals that were to prevail in the ideal society of the future" (p. 125).

I think I know what he means, but I find its style in linguistic contradiction with the last sentence of his introduction: "I wish it to be clearly understood that I consider it essential that the open society be preserved above all" (p. 18). I only want to make one point perfectly clear: confused prose erodes the open society; so do half-formulated ideas.

Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 416, Intergovernmental Relations in America Today (Nov., 1974), pp. 247-249 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of Political and Social Science