THE DECLINE OF NEO-FEUDALISM: THE CASE OF ISRAELl

The struggle for national independence is often led by a charismatic movement. Once independence has been gained, such movements tend, to use Max Weber's terminology, to become "routinized" by developing either "traditional" or "bureaucratic" structures. The outcome of the conflict between these two tendencies to a large extent determines the degree of political stability, the extent of civil rights, and the economic viability of the young nations. In the case of Israel, the bureaucratic elements are rapidly gaining over the traditional ones. An examination of this process as it is occurring there casts some light on the process of bureaucratization in other newly independent nations. The pre-independence nationalist movements manifest the elements typical of charismatic movements in general. First, they are led by potent leaders such as Gandhi, Nkrumah, and Ben-Gurion. Second, their mass membership is drawn from the disintegrating traditional structures, whether they be the village in India, the tribe in Ghana, or the traditional Jewish community in the Diaspora. The traditional bonds are usually broken at least in part by some ecological dislocation. This often takes the form of migration from th~ country to the emerging cities, though in the Israeli case it was an emigration from the cities in the Diaspora to the country-side of Palestine. Third, like other charismatic movements, movements for national independence command intense ideological commitments: they are anti-colonial, nationalist, and radicalthat is, they subscribe to some social reform or revolutionary doctrine of a Socialist character. Finally, as in other charismatic movements, there is little interest in economic, administrative, or scientific activities; neither are there available to the movement the social instruments which these activities require. Rarely do the independence movements have elaborate administrative apparatuses or stable economic resources and income of their own (e. g., their activities tend to be financed by contribution rather than by taxation).