Even in a society as tightly controlled as Singapore's, the market creates certain forces which perhaps in the long run may lead to democracy

East Asia confirms the superior capacity of industrial capitalism in raising the material standard of living of large masses of people.

The human organism is thus still developing biologically while already standing in a relationship to its environmont. In other words, the process of becoming man takes place in an interrelationship with an environment. (...) From the moment of birth, man's organismic development, and indeed a large part of his biological being as such, are subjected to continuing socially determined interference.

If a socialist economy is opened up to increasing degrees of market forces, a point will be reached at which democratic governance becomes a possibility.

When certain branches of the economy become obsolete, as in the case of the steel industry, not only do jobs disappear, which is obviously a terrible social hardship, but certain cultures also disappear.

I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization

We also have a cultural phenomenon: the emergence of a global culture, or of cultural globalization