NONTHEMATIC / Vol. 29, No. 4 (Winter 1962)
- Social Research An Int'l Quarterly
- Jan 1, 1963
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 29, 2023
The expression "American history" means in the United States, from grade schools to universities, the history of the United States. In Spanish America the same words mean the history of Latin America with an occasional, but not at all obligatory, reference to the United States and Canada. The provincialism of both these versions of the same familiar term is significant, and it is made more so because of the consistent and unquestioned way in which it occurs.
The view of negro-white relations in American society generally accepted by sociologists is that they are caste relations. A competing view--which has not achieved wide acceptance, although the terminology persists--is that the phenomena are best understood as race relations. The two approaches, regardless of the differences between them, deal primarily with the structure of negro-white relations and with the factors serving to maintain that relational structure.
The tendency for expanding cities to recruit population from ever more diverse traditions has a great bearing on urban social segmentation and political alignments. In the nineteenth century observers in Western Europe saw urbanization as a process of homogenization of the variety of rural cultures that each nation has encompassed. This process, they saw, led in turn to a nationwide working class with a culture of its own; a culture that was distinct from, if not antagonistic to, the classes above it.
The recent increase in local community-power studies produced by the various social sciences has again focused attention on the persistent problem of power in human affairs. It seems appropriate, therefore, to assess the methods, findings, and cumulative contribution of these studies. In the following pages the three principal methodologies are described, the findings of the studies are compared, and the insights that the models provide for future research are discussed.
J. Bensman and A. Vidich
A central problem in the study of social structure has been the precise relationship between social and economic classes and political power. The unilinear relationship between class and power as postulated by Marx has been denied by almost all uncommitted thinkers. Moreover, Marx's formulation that economic classes are the chief agents in political and social action presumes that classes have a corporate character and are active agents. Actually, even under Marxist analysis, classes are distributive phenomenon--that is, collections of individuals responding in roughly the same ways to the same economic situations--and not corporate entities as were the medieval estates.
Half a century has elapsed since the outstanding father-son team in American economics published the 1912 edition of The Control of Trusts. It seems appropriate at this time, therefore, to comment briefly on their contributions to the field of public policy on regulating business competition."
Hans Rothfels and Henry M. Pachter
Comments by the author of Die deutsche Opposition gegen Hitler in response to Henry M. Pachter's review note in Social Research, vol. 29, no. 1. At least on one point there seems to be agreement now: the German opposition against Hitler was more widespread, and began much earlier, than the conspiracy that led to the events of July 20, 1944. Hans Rothfels now concedes that the socialists were 'better organized'; in his book, the deficiencies of the left underground took nearly as much space as its techniques and achievements.
Discussion of Harold D. Lasswell's wide-reaching influence on American political thinking.
Discussion of four books, including Joseph Spengler's "Natural Resources and Economic Growth," Walter Isard and John H. Cumberland's "Regional Economic Planning: Techniques of Analysis for Less Developed Areas," Harvey S. Perloff's "Regions, Resources and Economic Growth," and J. Frederic Dewhurst, John O. Coppock, P. Lamartine Yates, and Associates "Europe's Needs and Resources: Trends and Procedures in Eighteen Countries," and their approaches to studying the relationship between natural and human resources in various stages of economic growth.
Review of book by Robert J. Lampman. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1962. 286 pp.
Edited and Translated by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar. Cambridge, M.I.T. Press; and New York, John Wiley. 1962. 168 pp.
Report on the Proceedings of the Conference, held in Lagos, Nigeria, January 3-7, 1961. Geneva: Commission Internationale de Juristes. 1961. 181 pp.
Review of book by Victor R. Fuchs. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1962. xxi & 566 pp.
Review of book by Max Black. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 1961. 363 pp.
Review of book by Karl Mannheim and W. A. C. Stewart. New York: The Humanities Press. 1962. 187 pp.
Review of book by Herbert Spiegelberg. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1960. 735 pp. 47.50 guilders.