Human existence, as we know, is inveterately ambiguous. Always the self strives above all for itself, yet also fears the loss of others. The organism's survival instincts may imply that the former urge is more deeply rooted than the latter. Some theories of human nature draw that conclusion. Yet to treat the yearning for the other as secondary or even accidental hardly accords with the reality of experience. In real life self-love and other-love, narcissism and altruism, wrestle incessantly with each other. Shifting endlessly in priority and balance, both are constitutive in human existence.

Tension between "person" and "society" or "social life" is a familiar form of this ambiguity. The problem is reminiscent of that old saw: Which came first, the hen or the egg? Persons and collectivities continuously and reciprocally create each other. The process is never-ending, re-enacting itself in every lifetime, every generation, every society. Choices must be made, and in these choices, personal good and the common good, though inseparable, remain in the end irreducible, the one into the other.

In the modern world this innate antinomy, person and society, intensifies. This is due above all to the complex transformations comprising the modernization of societies over the past two centuries. Our humanly-constructed artificial environment has vastly expanded, removing us ever further from our rootedness in nature. Similarly, increasing social complexity enlarges the spheres of personal autonomy. Human transactions for the most part take place in special purpose settings, extracted from moral community. "Unwilled" ties of kinship and place yield increasingly to "willed" contacts, more focused and efficient, perhaps, but also inconstant, ephemeral. Solidarities, once taken for granted, are subject now to constant renegotiation. And with the dawn of the electronic age, these processes speed up, perhaps exponentially.

The creation of the social sciences over the past century may be described as an important coping response to the new era. Though by now indispensable, these disciplines are also inherently the source of additional problems. On the one hand, they assert that social phenomena are sui generis, irreducible to their biological substratum. They seek to account for behaviors and patterns in terms of the "laws" of nature, employing thus the reason and the methods of the natural sciences. While these efforts yield important results, they do not fully fathom the human spirit. Quest and controversy continue to beset the enterprise.

Human nature, however defined, presumably has not changed materially since the appearance of the species. Comparatively speaking, however, personal autonomy, is a modernization emergent. Individuation and agency beyond the pale of clan and place become possible only with the rise of "society," of secondary associations beyond tribe and village. Early protagonists of modernization anticipated homogeneous outcomes. They were mistaken--certain tendencies may be universal, but not outcomes. Societies and cultures differ, and thus routes and destinations as well. Thus societies may modernize--Japan is an outstanding example--while important institutional traditions persist.

Competing paradigms of modernization have emerged, above all those championed by the "market" societies of the "West," and the "socialist" societies of eastern Europe. Global politics during the second half of our century were disturbed by the contest of these two paradigms for the "ear" of countries only beginning the modernization hegira. Actually the split between the competing conceptions arose in the Western experience and interpretation of its own modernization.

As the global preoccupation with human rights indicates, however, certain tendencies, however variant their forms, are universal. Around the world we ascribe increasingly to the notion that every human being is endowed with certain inalienable rights and dignities. While that "consciousness" is doubtlessly indebted to modern communications, it is tied as well to the structural transformations of modernization.

Harper's Ferry, WV.