“Historians two hundred years hence may see as central. . .”

“Historians two hundred years hence may see as central to the twentieth century what we ourselves have been paying almost no attention to: the emergence of a society of organizations in which every single social task of importance is entrusted to a large institution.

To us, the contemporaries, one of these institutions – government or big business, the university or the labor union – often looks like the institution.

To the future historian, however, the most impressive fact may be the emergence of a new and distinct pluralism. That is, of a society of institutional diversity and diffusion of power.

He may report for the closing decades of the twentieth century an upsurge of creative thought in the social and political spheres as great as that of the seventeenth century, when Bodin, Locke, and Hobbes gave us what we still call ‘modern social theory.’”