ABSTRACT
Few sociologists still recognize the handicap of studying social change after having "been long subject to the discipline of thought in sociology that discouraged the study of change". Wilbert E. Moore's study of changes in societies raises extremely important questions about the functional autonomy of certain features within the social system. His discussion of how this partial autonomy works out in relation to art, science, and technology offers very suggestive lines for further study. Moore's denial of the role of ideals and utopias in the actual conduct of social change is informed by an extreme rationalism. The structuralist school of development holds that the process of development requires smashing even more than mending, that is, requires an overhaul in social relations no less than in the level of industrial productivity. Moore tends to speak of modernization as an autonomous social process, and hence he avoids the political problems of planned development.
