Mike Reed

The Culture of Poverty: An Ideological Analysis:

For three decades Oscar Lewiss subculture of poverty concept has been misinterpreted as a theory bent on blaming the victims of poverty for their poverty. This essay corrects this misunderstanding. Using a sociology of knowledge approach, it explores the historical origins of this misreading and shows how current poverty scholarship replicates this erroneous interpretation of Lewiss work. An attempt is made to remedy this situation by arguing that Lewiss subculture of poverty idea, far from being a poor-bashing, ideological ploy, is firmly grounded in a Marxist critique of capital and its productive contradictions. As such, Lewiss work is a celebration of the resilience and resourcefulness of the poor, not a denigration of the lower class and the cultural defenses they erect against povertys everyday uncertainty.

The evolution of dissipative social systems

Social evolution is one of the master ideas of modem social science. For two hundred years the various phases of its development have served as benchmarks for measuring the progress of Western science. Similarly much of the history of the modem social sciences can be charted by the twists and turns that have marked the history of social evolutionary theory. In fact, the idea of social evolution was so much the vogue in the last century that thinkers with radically divergent ideological conceptions of humanity and society readily incorporated it into their theories. Consider the following: G. W. F. Hegel and Auguste Comte; Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, Frederick Engels and Herbert Spencer; William Graham Sumner and Lester Frank Ward; and, fmally, Andrew Carnegie and Jack London. Despite the political and theoretical differences among these individuals, each was drawn to the idea of social evolution and each fitted it into his respective research programs. Though intellectual historians usually consider the last half of the nineteenth century as “Darwin’s Century,” the 20th century has also been preoccupied with the idea of evolution. The recent cross-overs between the biological and sociological uses of evolutionary theory is, in fact, a halhnark of fm de si6cle intellectual life. Advances in the physical and biological sciences have stimulated a renewed interest in grand theories of social change among social scientists. This is not to say evolutionary theory has not suffered reversals or periods of neglect, for it has. Evolutionary thought in the social sciences was eclipsed during the middle half of this century by synchronic and ahistorical modes of social analysis. At one point the idea of social evolution seemed to have been ceded to anthropologists and antiquarians for safe keeping, as sociologists and political scientists turned en masse to a strangely ahistorical Cold War science. We can get an idea of the vicissitudes to which the idea of social evolution was subjected at mid-century by examining the works of Talcott Parsons, a social theorist who epitomized Cold War social science. Parsons launched his illustrious career in the late