Volume 1, Number 5 · October 31, 1963
Dr. Yes
By Jason Epstein
The First New Nation
by S.M. Lipset
Basic Books, 304 pp., $5.95
When I was an undergraduate at Columbia it was unfashionable to study sociology. Those who did were, one felt, the future businessmen of the class of 1949 or the dentists, the careerists, the politicians. My friends and I studied literature and not contemporary literature either. That too was unfashionable. It did not repay deep study, nor did American literature. Proust and Joyce, Emerson and Melville were for summer vacation. During the year we concentrated on Dante and Shakespeare and Milton and then, when we were seniors, we were thrust into the modern world through the great rolling surf of Blake and Wordsworth and Goethe and Byron. This is how we first learned of the French Revolution, the vicissitudes of the bourgeoisie and the problem of democracy—through the direct and passionate, if also the wilful and incomplete, record of these writers who, it seemed to us, experienced the emergence of this world most acutely. Only then did we catch sight of Bentham and Mill and still later of Max Weber strenuously casting his nets after abstract fish in waters which seemed to us too shallow to support real life.
Review, 3525 words
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