ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the successive systems of French social relations and French social institutions and discovers the same type of dysfunctions and the same kind of self-regulating patterns that were characteristic of the bureaucratic system. It shows that the key to the innovation processes of the French economic system lies primarily in the efficient management of the difficult relations. Jesse R. Pitts has presented a good and convincing analysis of the system of social control of the traditional French bourgeois family. This analysis adds a new link to a more general theory. This new analysis, however, remains inadequate on two counts. These are: the model it presents is static, and cannot, therefore, account for the changes and progress that have been realized; the important point neglected by Pitts concerns the relations between the bourgeois entrepreneurial system and the state bureaucracy. For the state bureaucracy, bourgeois entrepreneurship is a necessary cumbersome legacy of a paternalistic past.
