ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the United States produced a particular set of "structured predispositions", which is one way of defining values, for handling strains generated by social change. Though the United States and Great Britain are both urbanized, industrialized, and stable politically, they are integrated around different values and class relations. The symbolic retention of legitimate power in the hands of a Kaiser conceivably might have preserved the allegiance of the middle and upper classes to a democratic political system. Harry Eckstein argues that the instability of the Weimar Republic was a result of the strains between the authoritarian norms which characterized all non-governmental institutions and the democratic patterns of the political system. The values of France and Germany–their politically unstable cases–resemble those of the United States and Britain in many respects. The ancien regime provided virtually no institutional access for the rising bourgeoisie to political decision making, much less incorporation into the ranks of the decision makers.
