In 1959, when struggling to characterize the Black Carib community in which I had recently done fieldwork, I coined the word ‘neoteric’ to refer to societies which are neither primitive nor peasant, in which traditions are absent or very shallow, and which may be said to have arisen only recently in time. I picked the word from Roget's Thesaurus, selecting it because it seemed a good, short, catchy synonym for ‘new’.

In his rejoinder to my essay, ‘Egypt and the Myth of the New Middle Class’, Professor Halpern clings to a limited and dysfunctional concept. The concept of NMC was of limited use in 1963 when he wrote The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa; since then, it hasproved to be a misleading tool for explaining the politics of change in the Middle East, yet Halpern persists in reaffirming it. For seven years, Professor Halpern has been arguing the same tautologies. On the one hand he proposes a theory of a new middle class; on the other, he explains why the NMC still has not evolved. The NMC concept is so fundamental to his book that I, for one, have examined it closely—and have found its validity and usefulness limited. Halpern writes of the need for a new theory of the relationship between social classes and system-transforming change in the modern age, but he offers no good descriptive and analytical data to support his thesis. In fact, as we shall demonstrate later, his thesis is shaken by a confrontation with rigorous empirical and correlative analyses. A cursory review of recent literature shows us many recantations by authors who once applied Grand Theories to Comparative Politics. In the spirit of the era post-Committee for Comparative Politics-neo-scholasticism, I have consented to write a rejoinder. Let me state at the beginning that I will refrain from comments on Halpern's new vintage, ‘The Dialectics of Modernization in National and International Society’, although in his rejoinder Halpern insists that the NMC has been reaffirmed and reappraised in his ‘Dialectics’. This would require more than a rejoinder. In order to review or refute Halpern's new work, I would need to write a new article, and scarcity of time does not allow me this luxury.

In my previous response to Amos Perlmutter, I was compelled to use seven pages of this valuable journal to reaffirm what I had already written on the new middle class in The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East andNorth Africa (Princeton, 1963). Perlmutter had distorted my ideas beyond recognition in his ‘Egypt and the New Middle Class’. In his rejoinder, published above, he neither acknowledges nor challenges any of these seven pages of correction. The second part of my previous response contained the preliminary statement of a new theory which expanded and reinforced these earlier conclusions on the new middle class. This new theoretical framework has since been articulated at somewhat greater lengths in ‘A Redefinition of the Revolutionary Situation’, Journal of International Affairs (Vol. XXIII, No. 1,1969, 54–75) and will be published next year as The Dialectics of Modernization (Princeton). Perlmutter dismisses this part of the analysis as ‘so mystical that I refuse to deal with [it] here‘. So cavalier a critic ought at least to be armed with the capacity to read. But he fails at this basic skill a second time.

To the extent that the social sciences have been concerned with thestratification of Latin American societies they have shown a well-knowntendency to dichotomize their structures into a small upper class of wealthy and powerful landowners and a poor and powerless lower class hetero-geneously composed of rural workers, urban proletarians, petty traders, artisans, and the like. As a rule, the emergence of new classes and thegrowing internal differentiation of emergent or traditional classes are somewhat reluctantly admitted only as the societies of Latin America have demonstrated the ability to depart from their agrarian tradition and topursue the irreversible course of modernization. There has been a strong inclination to ignore or to minimize those aspects of the social structure which suggest a higher degree of complexity than the stereotype of a two-class system seems to indicate.

The cultural patterning of perceptions has long been an accepted fact. Theways we see and hear are learned. Special institutional mechanisms thatserve to perpetuate such traditional patterns exist in all societies and haverecently received attention by those interested in their transformationthrough modernization. Thus in order to study ‘The Primitive World andits Transformation’ Robert Redfield felt it necessary to focus upon what hecalled ‘the social organization of tradition’. He placed major emphasis upon those institutions that traditionally had perpetuated and elaborated the great philosophical and religious traditions of ancient civilizations, while keeping them integrated with the little traditions of peasant villagers. This was accomplished through drawing upon the creative impulses of the little tradition as sources of new stimuli to serve as points of departure for further elaboration of the great tradition. These would reinfluence the little tradition, establishing a chain of mutual interdependence.

Like differing versions of Vishnu, the same difficult problems continuallyreappear in the scholarly literature on India. The nature of caste, itsresiliency or dissolution in the face of modernization; the quality oftraditional Indian civilization, its adaptation or collapse in response toeconomic development and industrialization, are two questions whichcontinue to haunt the specialist on South Asia. What hangs in the balance is not only our understanding of social change or non-change in industrializing societies, but the validity of anthropology and the other social sciences as adequate methods of description and analysis in the contemporary world. If the ‘ethnographic present’ always remains only the past, then is not the value of anthropology and social science immeasurably diminished?

The General Prologue is often called a picture of its age and, frequently inthe next breath, a satire. In English Lit. this usually draws a stern lectureabout confusing the distinction between literature and history, but in thisessay, unobserved by my sophomores, I propose to talk about the General Prologue as a picture of its age and then, tentatively, about some uses suchhistory might be put to by historians and literary students.

For the first and only time in dramatic history, ‘Man’ as a generalized type appears on the stage as the central character of the early fifteenth-century English morality plays. The morality play itself, in contrast to the earlier mystery plays, which presented the Biblical drama of world history, represents the story of the individual Christian from birth to death and final salvation.‘Mankind’ represents all social classes at their lowest common denominator, an emphasis reinforced by the marginal situation of the wandering players who performed these plays and who themselves belonged to no recognized class within the social order. The appearance of Mankind as central actor resulted partly from the individualist and voluntarist emphasis of nominalist thought and partly from the renewed emphasis on the individual associated with social changes of the time. In the earlier morality plays, Mankind was guided about the stage by overwhelming supernatural figures; in the later moralities, like Everyman, ‘Mankind’ lost his generalized characteristics after about 1530 and became a historical personage or a personification of only one social class. We shall attempt to describe some of the reasons for ‘Mankind's’ appearance at this point in dramatic history and his development as a character from 1420 to 1520.