Volume 27, Number 16 · October 23, 1980
Take Me to Your Leader
By J.M. Cameron
Authority
by Richard Sennett
Knopf, 206 pp., $10.00
Radical Principles: Reflections of an Unreconstructed Democrat
by Michael Walzer
Basic Books, 310 pp., $15.00
Professor Sennett's The Fall of Public Man has been much admired; it gave us a jolt and made us think about the life of politics in a new way. Authority is a study of 'the emotional bonds of modern society,' and it approaches this study through analyses of these emotional bonds in a variety of 'cases.' These include the case of Helen Bowen, who has a black lover to spite her father, but in this reveals her dependence on him; the case of two employees of a modern corporation engaged in negotiation about the professional status and future of the junior of the two; and several cases arising out of the relations between accountants within a firm. There are also short accounts of the relations between the railway industrialist George Pullman and his workers in the model town he established and of attempts to establish model communities on similar principles in Waltham and Lowell, Massachusetts. Anthropological and historical information is used to illuminate the problems under discussion.
Review, 4007 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |