Best of
Social-Science

1971

The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (Esalen Book)


Abraham H. Maslow - 1971
    Maslow was one of the foremost spokespersons of humanistic psychology. In The Farthest Reaches of Human Nature, an extension of his classic Toward a Psychology of Being, Maslow explores the complexities of human nature by using both the empirical methods of science and the aesthetics of philosophical inquiry. With essays on biology, synergy, creativity, cognition, self-actualization, and the hierarchy of needs, this posthumous work is a wide-ranging synthesis of Maslow's inspiring and influential ideas.

Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare


Frances Fox Piven - 1971
    The authors present a boldly comprehensive, brilliant new theory to explain the comparative underdevelopment of the U.S. welfare state among advanced industrial nations. Their conceptual framework promises to shape the debate within current and future administrations as they attempt to rethink the welfare system and its role in American society."Uncompromising and provocative. . . . By mixing history, political interpretation and sociological analysis, Piven and Cloward provide the best explanation to date of our present situation . . . no future discussion of welfare can afford to ignore them." --Peter Steinfels, The New York Times Book Review

On Individuality and Social Forms


Georg Simmel - 1971
    In search of a subject matter for sociology that would distinguish it from all other social sciences and humanistic disciplines, he charted a new field for discovery and proceeded to explore a world of novel topics in works that have guided and anticipated the thinking of generations of sociologists. Such distinctive concepts of contemporary sociology as social distance, marginality, urbanism as a way of life, role-playing, social behavior as exchange, conflict as an integrating process, dyadic encounter, circular interaction, reference groups as perspectives, and sociological ambivalence embody ideas which Simmel adumbrated more than six decades ago."—Donald N. Levine Half of the material included in this edition of Simmel's writings represents new translations. This includes Simmel's important, lengthy, and previously untranslated "Group Expansion and Development of Individuality," as well as three selections from his most neglected work, Philosophy of Money; in addition, the introduction to Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, chapter one of the Lebensanschauung, and three essays are translated for the first time.

Pedagogy of the Heart


Paulo Freire - 1971
    Pedagogy of the Heart is filled with Freire's reminiscences of his early life and meditations "under my mango tree." These meditations include discussions of solitude and community, the limit of the Right, neoliberals and progressives, lessons from exile, the Lefts and the Right, dialogism, and faith and hope. Many of these subjects will be familiar to those who have read Freire before. For those coming to Freire for the first time, Pedagogy of the Heart will open new doors to the interrelations of education and political struggle. Further enhancing the text are substantive notes by Ana Maria Aranjo Freire.

Blaming the Victim


William Ryan - 1971
    Originally published in 1970, William Ryan's groundbreaking and exhaustively researched work challenges both liberal and conservative assumptions, serving up a devastating critique of the mindset that causes us to blame the poor for their poverty and the powerless for their powerlessness. More than twenty years later, it is even more meaningful for its diagnosis of the psychic underpinnings of racial and social injustice.

A Class Divided: Then and Now


William Peters - 1971
    was killed, Jane Elliott, a third-grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa, gave her pupils a unique lesson in discrimination. The first day, brown-eyed children were declared “superior,” given special privileges, and encouraged to discriminate against their suddenly “inferior” blue-eyed classmates. The next day, roles were reversed. What happened astonished both students and teacher. On both days, children labeled “inferior” took on the look and behavior of genuinely inferior students; they did inferior work. “Superior” students excelled in their work and delighted in discriminating against their erstwhile friends. Jane Elliott repeated the exercise with succeeding classes, and the third year, it was filmed for an award-winning television documentary, “The Eye of the Storm.” The original edition of A Class Divided, written by William Peters, the producer-director-writer of the documentary, expanded on the story revealed in the television program.This new edition of A Class Divided continues the story of Jane Elliott and her sixteen third-graders of 1970, eleven of whom returned to Riceville in 1984 for a reunion with their former teacher. In the new chapters, Peters reports on that meeting and its evidence that the long-ago lesson has had a profound and enduring effect on the students’ lives and attitudes—indeed, on the way they are raising their own children. Peters also relates the surprising reactions of employees of the Iowa Department of Corrections and other adults to the same exercise.The students’ reunion and the session with adult Corrections workers were covered in Peters’ recent Emmy-Award winning documentary, “A Class Divided.” This new edition of A Class Divided expands significantly on the material covered in both documentaries.

The Entropy Law and the Economic Process


Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen - 1971
    This is such a book, yet it is more. It is a "poetic" philosophy, mathematics, and science of economics. It is the quintessence of the thought that has been focused on the economic reality. Henceforce all economists must take these conclusions into account lest their analyses and scholarship be found wanting. "The entropy of the physical universe increases constantly because there is a continuous and irrevocable qualitative degradation of order into chaos. The entropic nature of the economic process, which degrades natural resources and pollutes the environment, constitutes the present danger. The earth is entropically winding down naturally, and economic advance is accelerating the process. Man must learn to ration the meager resources he has so profligately squandered if he is to survive in the long run when the entropic degradation of the sun will be the crucial factor, "for suprising as it may seem, the entire stock of natural resources is not worth more than a few days of sunlight!" Georgescu-Rogen has written our generation's classic in the field of economics."Library Journal

Culture, People, Nature: An Introduction to General Anthropology


Marvin Harris - 1971
    Speaking directly to students, helpful chapter introductions and end-of-chapter summaries focus on key points before and after reading each chapter. This seventh edition includes meticulous updating of research and scholarship, especially in the very active field of physical anthropology and archaeology. A new feature - "America Now Updates" - turns an anthropological eye on the contemporary U.S., emphasizing the comparative aspects of anthropology and making the discipline relevant to students.

Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York 1890-1930


Gilbert Osofsky - 1971
    Mr. Osofsky sets his chronicle against the background of pre-Harlem black life in New York City and in the context of the radical changes in race relations in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He traces Harlem's change to the largest segregated neighborhood in the nation and then its fall to a slum. Throughout he neatly balances statistics and humanly revealing details. "A careful and important study.... Osofsky at once takes his place alongside James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and others who have looked at Harlem at close range."-John Hope Franklin. "A pioneering scholarly achievement.... Although the subject engages his compassion, his presentation is rigorously straightforward and unsentimental and therefore all the more valuable as social analysis."-New York Times Book Review

The New Totalitarians


Roland Huntford - 1971
    

Why Men Fight


Bertrand Russell - 1971
    Russell argues that when individuals live passionately, they will have no desire for war or killing. Conversely, excessive restraint or reason causes us to live unnaturally and with hostility toward those who are unlike ourselves.

The Cuban Missile Crisis


Robert A. Divine - 1971
    

The Underdevelopment of Development


André Gunder Frank - 1971
    Gunder Frank deconstructed conventional development economics and modernization theory, creating dependency theory. Today dependency theory has been replaced by world systems analysis - the view that national and regional economic (and political) development cannot be seen in isolation; states are part of a global economy that, in a sense, dictates and limits action. This is an excellent synthesizing volume on the state of development studies. Although a great part of its purpose is to pay tribute to its intellectual fat

On Behalf of the Insane Poor: Selected Reports


Dorothea Lynde Dix - 1971
    These are selected historical reports on behalf of the insane poor. In D.L. Dix's 1843 plea to the Massachusetts Legislature she said, "I tell what I have seen painful and shocking as the details often are that from them you may feel more deeply the imperative obligation which lies upon you to prevent the possibility of a repetition or continuance of such outrages upon humanity. I proceed, Gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons confined withing this Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience."