Bendix, Reinhard

Reinhard Bendix (1916–91) was a comparative sociologist who made important contributions to the study of nation-building and the history of ideas, as well as the sociology of work. He was born, raised, and educated in Berlin. His father—a noted labor lawyer and scholar—exerted a profound intellectual influence on him. Adolf Hitler's rise to power forced his family into exile and his parents to Palestine. He moved to the United States to attend the College at the University of Chicago, where he obtained his Ph.D. in sociology in January 1947.

After a few months at the University of Colorado, he arrived in Berkeley as an assistant professor in a recently reorganized Department of Sociology and Social Institutions, where he stayed for the rest of his career. Bendix also became a fellow of the Institute of Industrial Relations, directed by Clark Kerr, which would sponsor the research leading to his most important book, Work and Authority in Industry (1956).

Bendix sought to understand how the ruling classes of different societies dealt with the breakdown of traditional patterns of subordination among people in the wake of industrialization. This is the classic sociological problem that Max Weber addressed with his three ideal types of authority—legal, traditional, and charismatic. Bendix provided answers as to the various ways in which societies may shift from a traditional to a legal mode of domination by looking at the relationship between the “few” and the “many” in industrial enterprises, settings that he treated as microcosms of society at large. As a true Weberian scholar, Bendix was unhappy about the insufficient attention devoted to the autonomous role of ideas in providing an answer to the transition from traditional to legal modes of authority.

As he lucidly observes in the book's first paragraph, “the few … have seldom been satisfied to command without a higher justification even when they abjured all interest in ideas, and the many have seldom been docile enough not to provoke such justifications.” Bendix presented managerial ideologies as “an effort to interpret the exercise of authority in a favorable light,” their purpose being “to promote the interests of ‘industry’ or ‘business’ collectively” or “to justify the privilege of voluntary action and association for [the managers], while imposing upon all subordinates the duty of obedience and of service to the best of their ability.”

Bendix's astute choice of cases for intensive comparative study is one of Work and Authority's most distinctive features. He compared two matched pairs of societies—England and the United States, and Russia and East Germany—to illustrate two different paths from traditional to legal domination, the liberal and the autocratic. His analysis proceeds in two steps. He first established the contrast between England and Russia at the inception of industry, then moved on to compare the United States and East Germany after industry has developed into a large-scale activity and has been bureaucratized. He repeatedly engaged in systematic comparisons, employing either the method of difference or the method of agreement, depending on the pair of countries considered. He gathered the empirical evidence from myriad books, articles, pamphlets, and texts written by a wide variety of politicians, management intellectuals, and labor leaders. He also used statistical information effectively, especially when it came to documenting the bureaucratization of industrial enterprises.

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