Persuasions and Prejudices An Informal Compendium of Modern Social Science, 1953-1988

Langue : Anglais

Auteur : Horowitz Irving

Couverture de l’ouvrage Persuasions and Prejudices

Résumé
Sommaire
Biographie

Review essays and statements written for special occasions may reveal as much about the writer as those written about; this is the presumption undergirding this collection of thirty-five years of criticism and commentary by Irving Louis Horowitz. For this volume, he selected his comments on famous, near famous, and infamous sociologists, political scientists, and assorted literary figures in between. Taken as a whole, this volume will surprise and delight readers who are acquainted with Horowitz's other works as well as those who are interested in the people he writes about.

The book covers notable social scientists, from Arendt to Zetterberg, and such major figures in between as Becker, Bell, de Jouvenel, Mills, Parsons, Solzhenitsyn, and more than eighty others who have had an effect on the contemporary social and political landscape. Each is critically examined, sometimes positively, other times negatively. Horowitz was a major figure in his own right, and his writing here displays the kind of refreshing frankness experts will expect and the general reader will appreciate.

The underlying assumption behind the volume, giving its disparate parts a unified characteristic, is that together these observations on others amount to a general perspective on social science held by the author. Whether his larger ambition is accepted or disputed, there is no doubt that the volume provides a standard against which to measure the literary quality of writing in the world of professional social research.

I: Philosophical Antecedents to Social Theory; 1: Sense and Structure in Social History; 2: Science and Society in the Enlightenment; 3: The Pre-History of the Sociology of Knowledge; 4: Staking Present Claims on Past Icons; 5: On the Social Theories of Fascism; 6: On Power and Statecraft; 7: Public Affairs and Private Lives; 8: History and Society in Retrospect; 9: Rationalism and Irrationalism in History; 10: Means and Ends in Nationalism; 11: Marxian Myths and Pragmatic Dragons; 12: Utility Theory as Social Theory; 13: Phenomenological Social Science; 14: Closed Societies and Open Minds; 15: Science, Religion and Natural Philosophy; II: Development and Change; 16: Politics, Labor and Development; 17: Misanthropism as Conservatism; 18: Democracy and Development in a One-Party State; 19: Taking Lives and Developing Societies; 20: The Rise and Fall of Counter Insurgency; 21: Massification, Mobilization and Modernization; 22: A Naive Sophisticate; 23: Schisms and Chasms in International Affairs; 24: Reactionary Immortality; 25: Middle Classes and Militarism in Latin America; 26: Prophecy and Postindustrial Myths; 27: Modernization as Abstract Expression; 28: Intellectuals and Social Change; 29: Personal Values and Social Change; 30: Martyrdom and Vietnam; 31: Isolation, Intervention and World Power; 32: Multinational Parochialism; 33: Power and Change in an Industrial Context; 34: The Politics of Urban Research; 35: Anthropological Sociology; 36: Militarism and Development; 37: Class, Race and Pluralism; III: Ethnicity and Religiosity; 38: Manners, Civility and Civilization; 39: Liquidation or Liberation?; 40: First Amendment Blues; 41: Community and Polity; 42: Bodies and Souls; 43: Ethnicity as Experience; 44: Documenting the Holocaust; 45: Eclecticism in Search of an American Theology; 46: The Politics of Genocide; 47: Jewish History and American Destinies; 48: The Jews and Modern Communism; 49: Jewish Soul on Ice; 50: Anti-Semitic Linchpins; IV: Social Research as Ideology and Utopia; 51: Sociological Pragmatism; 52: Behavioral Science as Ideology; 53: Social Contexts of Thought; 54: The Rise and Fall of Practically Everything; 55: Law, Order and the Liberal State; 56: Is There an American Power Elite?; 57: Bureaucratic Illusions; 58: American Virtues / Washington Vices; 59: Social Psychology in a Dismal Decade; 60: Political Troubles and Personal Passions; 61: The Warring Sociologists; 62: Culture of Sociology and Sociology of Culture; 63: Is the Future an Extension of the Present?; 64: The Banality of Culture; 65: An American Rorschach Test; 66: A Postscript to a Sociological Utopian; 67: Personal Values and Social Class; 68: The Iconoclastic Imagination; 69: Malevolence and Beneficence in State Power; 70: Sociological Disinformation; 71: A Funeral Pyre for America; 72: Political Pluralism and Democratic Power; 73: Sociology for Sale; V: The Ethical Foundations of Political Life; 74: Open Societies and Free Minds; 75: Tribune of the Intelligentsia; 76: Privacy, Ethics and Social Science Research; 77: From Ideological Ends to Moral Beginnings; 78: Is a Science of Ethics Possible?; 79: The Responsibilities of Sociology; 80: The Tragedy of Triumphalism; 81: The Two Cultures of Policy; 82: Counterrevolutionary Values or National Interests?; 83: Knowledge for Democracy; 84: Revolution, Retribution and Redemption; 85: Social Theory as Revolutionary Virtue; 86: Visions of Revolution and Values of Europe; 87: Knowledge and Its Values; About the Author

Irving Horowitz