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NONTHEMATIC / Vol. 30, No. 3 (Fall 1963)


Jean Piaget
The Attainment of Invariants and Reversible Operations in the Development of Thinking

[reprinted in 51:1 50th Anniversary Issue]

It is the aim of the essay to introduce American readers to more recent studies of children’s thinking and the development of intelligence. The essay suggests that the structure of propositional operations is a complex structure which comprises both lattices and groups. Such a structure has many possibilities and implications. These may remain potentialities only, or they may be realized when there arises a problem requiring propositional operations. This hypothesis is not just of psychological interest but also has physiological relevance.


Dennis H. Wrong
Human Nature and the Perspective of Sociology

What role does a conception of human nature play in sociological theory? What role should it play, if any? To what extent does a sociological perspective in general, and the currently dominant perspective of structural-functional sociology in particular, encourage sociologists to construct an implicit or explicit idea of human nature that is dangerously selective and one-sided?

Bennett M. Berger
On the Youthfulness of Youth Cultures

For more than twenty years now, sociologists have increasingly concerned themselves with the study of “youth culture.” Talcott Parsons’ very influential article, published in 1942, with its much quoted characterization of youth culture as “more or less specifically irresponsible” has become a point of departure for an enormous amount of research and discussion on youth. Parsons’ characterization of youth culture, however, inadvertently suggests that whatever it is that constitutes the “youthfulness” of youth culture may have less to do with chronology than culture.

Jan S. Prybyla
The Quest for Economic Rationality in the Soviet Bloc

Since Stalin’s death, but especially after 1955, Soviet and East European economists as well as mathematicians have engaged in a lively debates aiming to make the operation of relatively “sophisticated socialist command economies” more “efficient.”

John Meisel
The Stalled Omnibus: Canadian Parties in the 1960s

The similarities between American and Canadian parties are, indeed, so striking that their differences are often overlooked. The most far reaching and fundamental of these differences concerns them not individually, but taken together. The two-party systems differ in some important respects and notably in the degree to, and manner in , which each contains the various interests and groupings that constitute their respective countries’ political community.

Lincoln H. Day
Population Characteristics and World Power

Review of Katherine and A.F.K. Organski. Population and World Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1961. 263 pp.

Review of Philip Hauser. Population Perspectives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 1960, 183 pp.

Review of Sripati Chandra-Sekhar. Red China: An Asian View. New York: Fredrik Praeger. 1961. 230 pp.

Charles Herbert Stember
Society and Self: A Reader in Social Psychology

Review of book by Bartlett H. Stoodley. New York: Glencoe Free Press, 1962. 695 pp.

Helmut R. Wagner
Human Behavior and Social Processes: An Interactionist Approach

Review of book edited by Arnold M. Rose. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1962. 680 pp.

David Schwartzman
Distribution in Great Britain and North America: A Study in Structure and Productivity

Review of book by Margaret Hall, John Knapp, and Christopher Wren. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. 231 pp.

Alexander S. Balinky
Economic Trends in the Soviet Union

Review of book by Abram Bergson and Simon Kuznets. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. 303 pp.

Harold W. Pfautz
The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion

Review of book by Roger Daniels. Berkeley and LA, Calif.: University of California Press, 1962. 165 pp.

Philippa Strum
Administrative Law: The Informal Process

Review of book by Peter Woll. Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1963. 190 pp.

Richard C. Kostelanetz
Soviet Attitudes Towards American Writing

Review of book by Deming Brown. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962. 338 pp.

Murray Hausknecht
Youth: Change and Challenge

Review of book by Erik H. Erikson. New York and London: Basic Books, Inc., 1963. 284 pp.

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