Robert Bierstedt

Edward Alsworth Ross

The endeavor to establish in each sphere of social life a single, typical sequence of changes is bound to fail.

Pitirim A. Sorokin

Sociology appeared with criticism, has grown with criticism, and lives with criticism. If we care to promote sociology as a science, a critical attitude must be displayed by all sociologists as regards any sociological theory, without any exception whatsoever.

CHAPTER 10 – Robert K. Merton

It would seem reasonable to suppose that sociology will advance in the degree that its major concern is with developing theories of the middle range and will be frustrated if attention centers on theory in the large.

CHAPTER 3 – Charles Horton Cooley

Self and society are twin-born, we know one as immediately as we know the other, and the notion of a separate and independent ego is an illusion.

William Graham Sumner

It is vain to imagine that “a scientific man” can divest himself of prejudice or previous opinion, and put himself in an attitude of neutral independence towards the mores.

George A. Lundberg

Even if I should admit that social scientists are today merely chipping flint in the Stone Age of their science, I do not see that we have any choice but to follow the rough road that other sciences have traveled.

David Ehrenfeld. The Arrogance of Humanism. Pp. ix, 286. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

can students, in a form which can be tested by SPSS in an easy fashion, Blau already has found acceptance in graduate courses by those professors who want students to study theory which can immediately be put to work. Thus by reintroducing Simmel into the graduate curriculum in an easy-to-use form, the process at work seems to be relegitimization rather than a new approach or theory of society such as Giddens is working toward. GEORGE H. CONKLIN North Carolina Central University Durham

10.95:

mon people instead of kings, dukes, aristocrats and the wealthy elites as most earlier history books did, distinguishes this new study which analyzes the life styles of peasants, common workers, artisans and industrial workers in the period from 1700 to the present. If we remember Barett Wendell’s characteristics of excellence, Professor Shorter meets their request of clarity, elegance and force of style and combines them with his excellent humor, his courageous criticism, his modesty as to his conclusions and his warm understanding of the decisive value of love and mutual respect between the members of the family. Undergraduate and graduate students of history, anthropology, sociology and social work will welcome Shorter’s clear and stimulating analysis of the changing character and functions of the family here and in Europe during the past three centuries. Of special interest in this study is the explanation about the changing position of women, young and adolescent children, of per-

JOSEPH WEIZENBAUM. Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. Pp. xii, 300. San Francisco, Calif.: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1976.

Elizabeth Ann Weinberg, a graduate of Vassar, took her Master’s degree at Harvard with the late Merle Fainsod on public opinion research in the Soviet Union, and her doctorate with Leonard Schapiro at the London School of Economics, where she is currently a member of the Department of Sociology. The book at hand, whose title accurately indicates its content, is an expansion of her dissertation. She calls it &dquo;a case study in the institutionalization of a discipline in a particular society.&dquo; The particular society, of course, is one in which inquiry in general has suffered certain constraints. Before the Revolution, a period to which the author intentionally devotes only two pages, Russian sociology was subject to the same influences that characterized sociology in the rest of Europe and in the United States. It concerned itself with such themes as the philosophy of history, the history of civilization, the idea of progress, political philosophy, and the nature of sociology itself. After the Revolution sociology became, by official decree, historical materialism, although such subjects as biosociology (the relationship between organic and social forces) and criminology were temporarily tolerated, especially at the Psycho-Neurological Institute and the University of Petrograd, where Sorokin,