Weber contends that rationalization also results in the increasing independence of morality and law, along with their basic decision rules, from the context in which they are first formulated.

Weber also believes that rationalization processes in the modern world tend to destroy the possibility of an ethical life, represented most dramatically by his depiction of modern society as an "iron cage" which destroys people's sense of meaning.

Like Weber, Parsons is very interested in the ramifications of rationalization for the modern social order. Parsons is concerned with the sociological conditions for the emergence of universalism, especially the universalistic criteria for understanding and evaluating the social world and their relationship to a democratic, market-oriented, liberal social order.

For parsons, universalism is related to the differentiation processes characteristic of modernity. As societies modernize, different societal "units" become autonomous, while

The degeneration of the Bolshevik dictatorship into "power that is not limited by any laws, not bound by any rules, and is based directly on force" compromised and impoverished the Communist ideas and plans for social development as an order and continuous process of social growth.

Sigmund Krancberg: A Soviet Postmortem

simultaneously becoming more functionally interdependent.

If the first two revolutions were energy revolutions - based on steam power and electricity - the third revolution, it was generally agreed, was an information revolution.

By 1990 the Soviet Union - politically, economically and in national terms - was an empire in crisis and turmoil. Gorbachev had sought unsuccessfully to lead a perilous transition from Brezhnev`s authoritarian, centralized system toward pluralism and market socialism. He had moved far beyond Khrushcev in encouraging a pitiless examination of previous Soviet policies and history, inducing many to question sharply the legitimacy of the Soviet regime.

The new info-sphere operates in a global context. A worldwide electronic network of libraries, archives and data bans comes into being, accessible in principle to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Past societies, says Bell, were primarily space-bound or time-bound. Industrialism confirmed space in the nations state while replacing the rhythms and tempo of nature with the pacing of the machine. The clock and the railway timetable are the symbols of the industrial age. They express time in hours, minutes, seconds. The computer, the symbol of the information age, thinks in nanoseconds, in thousandths of microseconds.

Maynard, a pseudonym for a staff member of the United States Congress, asserts that the West deserves no credit for the USSR's collapse. The Soviet system collapsed because of the basic flaws of socialism.

3. Contribution to the fall of the Soviet system has been a deliberate policy of identification with the nations under Communist tutelage.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Society Bell, Soviet Union, , Postmortem Krancberg, Norbert Wiener, Weber Parsons, President Reagan, Yeltsin Russia, Gorbachev August, Weber Durkheim, soviet union, information society, soviet system, collapse soviet, society information, modern society, collapse soviet union, soviet regime, modern social, glasnost democratization, industrial society, society information society, development information technology,
Approximate Word count = 1713
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)