Best of
Sociology

1971

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

Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin


Ashley Montagu - 1971
    "All professionals concerned with human behavior will find something of value. . . . Parents . . . can gain insight into the nurturing needs of infants."--Janet Rhoads, American Journal of Occupational Therapy

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.

Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society


Bertell Ollman - 1971
    The book further contains a detailed examination of Marx's philosophy of internal relations, the much neglected logical foudation of his method, and provides a systematic account of Marx's conception of human nature. Because of its almost unique concern with helping readers understand Marx's unusual use of language, Alienation has proven very popular in university courses on Marxism on both undergraduate and graduate levels. The first edition was widely reviewed, and in this new edition Professor Ollman replies to his critics in 'More on internal relations, ' published here as Appendix II. In addition to this new appendix the author now provides a more systematic discussion of Marx's theory of ideology, elements of which were formerly dispersed throughout the book. He also attempts to set the treatment of political alienation within the broader framework of Marx's theory of the state as a model of how an approach based on internal relations can be used to integrate various apparently contradictory interpretations of Marx's views

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.

Deschooling Society


Ivan Illich - 1971
    It is a book that brought Ivan Illich to public attention. Full of detail on programs and concerns, the book gives examples of the ineffectual nature of institutionalized education. Illich posited self-directed education, supported by intentional social relations in fluid informal arrangements.

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.

In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture


George Steiner - 1971
    Steiner’s discussion of the break with the traditional literary past (Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Latin) is illuminating and attractively undogmatic.  He writes as a man sharing ideas, and his original notions, though scarcely cheerful, have the bracing effect that first-rate thinking always has.” –New Yorker“In Bluebeard’s Castle is a brief and brilliant book.  An intellectual tour de force, it is also a book that should generate a profound excitement and promote a profound unease…like the great culturalists of the past.  Steiner uses a dense and plural learning to assess his topic: his book has the outstanding quality of being not simply a reflection on culture, but an embodiment of certain contemporary resources within it.  The result is one of the most important books I have read for a very long time.”—New Society

Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time


Richard M. Weaver - 1971
    This classic work by the author of Ideas Have Consequences boldly examines the Intellectual roots of our current cultural crisis.

Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities 1938-1968


Eric Bentley - 1971
    This highly readable and absorbing collection of significant excerpts from the hearings shows with painful clarity how HUAC grew from a panel that investigated possible subversive activities in a "dignified" manner to a huge, unrelenting accusatory finger from which almost no one was safe. This book serves as a warning for the future and creates living history from the documentary record. "The basic document with which all future studies of the [House Un-American Activities] Committee will have to begin." —Dalton Trumbo "...what he has done is give us HUAC as spectacle, and the perspective is shattering."—Victor Navasky, The New York Times

Selected Political Writings


Rosa Luxemburg - 1971
    

Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America


Mary Frances Berry - 1971
    In this groundbreaking study, constitutional scholar Mark Frances Berry analyzes the reasons why millions of African Americans whose lives have improved enormously, both socially and economically, are still at risk of police abuse and largely unprotected from bias crimes.

On Democracy, Revolution, and Society


Alexis de Tocqueville - 1971
    For more than 120 years, his uncanny predictive insight has continued to fascinate thinkers, and his writings have continued to influence our interpretations of history and society. His analyses of many issues remain relevant to current social and political problems. In this volume John Stone and Stephen Mennell bring together for the first time selections from the full range of Tocqueville's writings, selections that illustrate the depth of his insight and analysis.

Primitive, Archaic & Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi


Karl Polanyi - 1971
    (Classical economics and the ideology of laissez-faire, as well as Marxian socialism, came out of the English Industrial Revolution). He was particularly concerned to dislodge the notion -so widely and implicitly held- that markets are ubiquitous and invariable form of economic organization; that any economy can be translated into market terms, and the further notion that economic organization determines social organization and culture in all societies. These he regarded as wrong generalizations from the one very special case (laissez-faire capitalism) for which they are true. He argued that these generalizations must be disproved and disbelieved if we are evet to make industrial technology serve the needs of human community, and indeed if we are to understand the nature of economic organization in early and primitive economies. -from the Introduction by George Dalton, professor of economics and anthropology at Northwestern University.This volume brings together some of the significant essays by late Karl Polanyi, whose writings are among the most influential factors in the present growth of interest in comparative economic systems and economic anthropology.

The Little Red Schoolbook


Søren Hansen - 1971
    Why? Because this little book aimed to educate teenagers about democracy, sex and drugs – in frank, simple language – and encouraged them to view adults as “paper tigers”.The Little Red Schoolbook has been unavailable for more than 40 years, but it remains surprisingly relevant for young people today. Reissued here in its original and uncensored format, with informative footnotes and a new foreword by the surviving author Søren Hansen, it encourages teenagers to have the confidence to seek information for themselves, challenge authority and question the status quo.

Absentee Ownership: Business Enterprise in Recent Times - The Case of America


Thorstein Veblen - 1971
    According to Thorstein Veblen, absentee ownership is the main and immediate controlling interest in the life of civilized men. It is the paramount issue between the civilized nations, and guides the conduct of their affairs at home and abroad. World War I, says Veblen, arose out of a conflict of absentee interests and the peace was negotiated with a view to stabilize them. Part I of the book is occupied with a summary description of that range of economic circumstances and that sequence of economic growth and change that led up through the nineteenth century and have come to a head in the twentieth century. Part II is an objective, theoretical analysis of those economic circumstances described in the first part of the book. Marion Levy writes in his introduction about the phrase "absentee ownership" and how it has a definite connotation, representing a dark figure in the economic system, a frustration of desired levels of self-sufficiency. In the early days, the giants of business enterprise had faces--Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Ford, Edison--but they all turned into faceless bureaucracies, says Levy. The giants may not have been nice, but they had faces and human traits. Absentee ownership wiped that out for the common man. Veblen's book continues to be of vital importance to the studies of economics, political theory, and sociology.

The System Of Modern Societies


Talcott Parsons - 1971
    

Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture


Walter J. Ong - 1971
    Ong focuses on the complex and dynamic relationship between verbal performance and cultural evolution. By studying the history of rhetoric and related arts from classical antiquity through the age of romanticism to the modern period, Ong both illuminates the past and helps explain late-twentieth-century modes of expression.Elegantly written and wide ranging, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology traces the evolution of devices used to store, retrieve, and communicate knowledge. Ong discusses diverse topics including memory as art, associationist critical theory, the close relationship between romanticism and technology, and the popular culture of the 1970s. This book also contains essays about Tudor writings in English on rhetoric and literary theory, the study of Latin as a Renaissance puberty rite, Ramism in the classroom and in commerce, Jonathan Swift's notion of the mind, and John Stuart Mill's politics.

Crisis in Utopia: The Ordeal of Tristan Da Cunha


Peter A. Munch - 1971
    

Animals, Men and Morals: An Enquiry Into the Maltreatment of Non-Humans


Stanley Godlovitch - 1971
    

The Aesthetics of Pornography


Peter Michelson - 1971
    Michelson argues for pornography's legitimacy as a distinctive literary genre, and as a form of writing which provides insight into man's demonic side.

A La Mode: On the Social Psychology of Fashion


René König - 1971
    

The Marx-Engels Reader


Karl Marx - 1971
    This revised and enlarged edition of the leading anthology provides the essential writings of Marx and Engels--those works necessary for an introduction to Marxist thought and ideology.

Born to Rebel: An Autobiography


Benjamin Elijah Mays - 1971
    Mays, son of a sharecropper, was born on August 1,1894, in Greenwood County, South Carolina. His earliest memory, of a lynching party that stormed through the county, that taunted but did not kill his father, became for him an enduring image of black-white relations in the South.

German Uniforms of the Third Reich, 1933-1945


Brian Leigh Davies - 1971
    Nearly 250 of the most important ones appear here, modeled by their most typical wearers. The paintings -- based on contemporary photographs for accuracy-depict all the primary styles ptive sections explain each uniform's place in the hierarchy, the battle roles of the wearer, and a fascinating range of detail.

The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations


Roger Bastide - 1971
    First published in France in 1960, the book represents a singular effort to develop a theory of the interpenetrations of African, European, Christian, and non-Christian cultures in Brazil from colonial times to the present. Addressing a remarkable range of topics—from mysticism and syncretism to the problems of collective memory, from the history of slavery in Brazil to world-wide race relations—the work is shaped by the author's rich and original conceptual framework. The result is a compelling study of the origins and growth of a native religious environment.The English translation is supplemented with a biographical foreword by Richard Price and a thematic introduction by Brazilian sociologist Duglas T. Monteiro.

Class Inequality And Political Order


Frank Parkin - 1971
    

Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education


Michael F.D. Young - 1971
    

Los Mojados: The Wetback Story


Julian Samora - 1971
    

An Introduction to Brazil


Charles Wagley - 1971
    

The Five Civilized Tribes


Grant Foreman - 1971
    Both groups were deployed against the tribes of the prairies, both breaking the soil of the undeveloped hinterland. Both were striving in the years before the Civil War to found schools, churches, and towns, as well as to preserve orderly development through government and laws.In this book Grant Foreman brings to light the singular effect the westward movement of Indians had in the cultivation and settlement of the Trans-Mississippi region. It shows the Indian genius at its best and conveys the importance of the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles to the nascent culture of the plains. Their achievements between 1830 and 1860 were of vast importance in the making of America.

First Things, Last Things


Eric Hoffer - 1971
    begins with a macro view on the progress of civilization, ending with his crucible vision on the unique and transformative aspects of mankind.

The Degradation Of The Academic Dogma: The University In America, 1945 1970


Robert A. Nisbet - 1971
    Robert Nisbet accuses universities of having betrayed themselves. Over the centuries they earned the respect of society by attempting to remain faithful to what he terms "the academic dogma," the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The measure of a university's greatness and of the stature of an individual scholar was determined not by the immediate usefulness of the work done, but by how much it contributed to scholarship, learning, and teaching.American universities abandoned this ideal, Nisbet charges, after World War II, welcoming onto their campuses academic entrepreneurs engaged in the "higher capitalism," the highly profitable sale of knowledge. This "reformation," says Nisbet, has resulted in the greatest change in the structure and values of the university that has occurred since their founding as guilds in the Middle Ages. And it may be responsible, for reasons he spells out in convincing detail, for their eventual demise as centers of learning.In her introduction, Gertrude Himmelfarb pays tribute to Robert Nisbet for his prescience in analyzing the reformation of the university in the postwar period. A second reformation, she says, has further undermined the academic dogma, first by applying the principles of affirmative action and multiculturalism to the curriculum as well as to student admissions and faculty hiring, and then by "deconstructing" the disciplines, thus subverting the ideas of truth, reason, and objectivity. The Degradation of the Academic Dogma is even more pertinent today than when it was first published a quarter of a century ago. For those concerned with the integrity of the university and of intellectual life, Robert Nisbet has once again proved himself a prophet and a mentor.

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."

In the Village


Anthony Bailey - 1971
    

The Travels of Captain Cook


Ronald Syme - 1971
    

Sociology: the classic statements


Marcello Truzzi - 1971