The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s16.t4.2

c7.s16.t4.2

We need not however be hundred per cent Paretians and admit that the *élites* of one generation or culture-stage are *entirely* replaced by those of the next. The emergence of new elements from the lower orders is a reality. For one thing, the army, as we have indicated above, has been one of the greatest “social ladders.” These new elements have, because of military, political, economic, sexual and other circumstances, many chances of getting admitted into and fused or mixed up with the already existing dominant classes. It is these fusions and inter-mixtures that enable the transition from generation to generation of *élites* to appear not as an abrupt breach with the past or a total replacement of old by new, but as a generally steady although often revolutionary process of societal transformation. Thus considered, the historical movements, the social mobilities, the dynamic processes, the *charaiveti* ("move on") activities ought really to be described as the continuous democratizations of world-culture through the rise of the lower and their absorption into the *élites* rather than as marches from aristocracy to aristocracy.⁵⁵