ABSTRACT
In an African society of the past where the economy was based on subsistence agriculture, economic, political and social organization were characteristically determined largely by lineage. In the Nazi concentration camps the administrators deliberately created a capricious and unpredictable social environment, to destroy the personality of their prisoners: very few could withstand for more than a year or two this relentless social bafflement. Between city and village, between economic systems and systems of social insurance, the unevenness of change leaves incompatible principles of organization unreconciled. The preoccupation with national unity leads towards the goal of a radical transformation of every section of society, based on common principles. And acts of arbitration are amongst the most sensitive means of evolving pragmatically the principles of a social order. A definition of social relationships, explicit enough and enduring enough to give their citizens a secure sense of their own identity within the system, imposes a constraint which handicaps adjustment to circumstances and experience.
