Modelling the Crisis-Megasociety, Multiple Codes, and Social Blanks

Megasociety, Multiple Codes, and Social Blanks Satish Saberwal This paper presents a mo4el interpreting the social crisis in contemporary India in the following terms. The long historical social processes characteristic of India have been markedly different from those in Europe. Undergird- ed by the Roman Catholic Church and working with still older cultural resources, such as Greek logic and Roman legal techniques, European societies moved towards a unification of codes which facilitated an enlarging of operative scales, culminating in the megasocieties of our time. Colonialism fitted India with a megasocietal technosocial frame for its own purposes; but the highly segmented Indian social space had carried a multiplicity of codes. As these diverse codes flow into the megasocietal institutions, these latter move towards breakdown. In this and in other regards, the maintaining and the renewing of a megasociety calls for a range of institutional capabilities whose weakness or absence among us