¹ In what follows, unless otherwise specified, I shall usually use the word ‘belief’ to refer to evaluative, appreciative and cognitive judgments; it should be understood as covering procedural rules, cognitive, ‘factual’ propositions regarding empirical and trans-empirical events, etc. I shall also deal with ‘traditional’ actions but primarily with respect to the beliefs which engender ‘traditional’ action.

² We could use the term ‘tradition’ to refer to every belief which is believed at a given moment by a particular person and which was believed and accepted previously by that person and which was believed and accepted previously by that person ‘because’ he accepted (i.e. believed) it even prior to that earlier point. What a person believes at any point in time is in a sense transmitted to him by himself. It would be an ‘intrapersonal’ tradition. ‘Intrapersonal traditions’ are closely connected with interpersonal traditions. The fact that a person believes at a given moment what he previously believed enhances the likelihood that he will continue to believe it in the future and that he will offer it to someone else in a way which will differ from the way in which it would be offered if he had not believed it at an earlier time. In this paper I am interested primarily in interpersonal and above all intergenerational traditions but I do not gainsay the significance of the intrapersonal traditions for the interpersonal.

³ Actions are not handed down; only their models, rules and legitimations are.

⁴ There is no direct linear relationship between influence and age. The more ‘juventocentric’ a society, the earlier the beginning of the downward curve of the influence of advancing age. Even in such societies, however, elders continue to have preponderance of influence for a substantial period; and this influence is enhanced by the correlation between the allocation of power and age which even the most ‘juventocentric’ societies have not succeeded in overcoming. As long as there are ‘careers’, those who enter earlier will have advantages not simultaneously available to those who have entered later. Only if ‘experience’ ceases to be equatedc with the number of years of service or if experience comes to be excluded as a criterion of recruitment and is replaced by other criteria which are not correlated with age will later entrants stand on a more equal footing with the earlier entrants. This might diminish the amount of ‘traditional belief’ in a society in relation to the total body of beliefs in that society but it cannot eliminate it.

⁵ The attachment to the past might have very narrow and particular foci such as the literary production or the books produced in a certain past period or the furniture, painting, silverware, domestic ornamentation or dress. There is certainly a marked element of traditionality in all this—it is an attachment to what has been handed down—but it is desirable to distinguish the aesthetic appreciation and particularly the aesthetic appreciation of a segregated sector of the past from the handing down and reception of the cognitive and moral beliefs which enter constitutively into social structure.

⁶ Cf. Thomas, W. I. and Znaniecki, F., The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, Vol. II, in which the three types of bohemians, creative persons and Philistines are delineated. The bohemian is the compulsive refuser of tradition. The ‘philistine’ is the unquestioning recipient who, in his own quiet way, makes modifications through his inability or failure to live up to the demands of traditional standards, while not being in revolt against them. (There may always be a little bit of revolt in the modification of traditional standards by the ‘philistine’.)Google Scholar

⁷ ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ in The Sacred Wood.

⁸ I reject Alfred Weber's conception of culture as an activity and a body of works which are not cumulative in their relations to each other and which, unlike science, are constantly being regenerated and renewed. Alfred Weber thought that cultural accomplishments (art, literature, philosophy) do not rest on past achievement; they are not part of a cumulative and developing tradition but depend exclusively on the stock of creativity existing in a given population among those seeking to practise a particular expressive genre. Cf. Alfred Weber, Prinzipielles zur Kultursoziologie, originally printed in Archiv fuer Sozialwissenschaft.

⁹ Nonetheless, where intentional modifications are experienced as contrary to the spirit of the tradition, they might well leave some trace of guilt and resentment on the part of those who have instigated them. This might also be true where the modification is not intentional but where, for one reason or another, because it is sufficiently gross to be noticed by those who participate in the modification or where because of a shift in the form and name of the institution which carried out the traditional norm, it is thought to be contrary to tradition. It is much more likely to do so in so far as, consciously or unconsciously, even if incorrectly, the agents of the modification believe that they have been responsible for bringing about the deviation from the traditional belief to such an extent that it appears to them to be no longer a member of the same family of traditional belief to which it formerly belonged.