Volume 15, Number 6 · October 8, 1970
Conservative Man
By Tom Bottomore
Politics and the Social Sciences
edited by Seymour Martin Lipset
Oxford, 328 pp., $7.50
Student Politics
edited by Seymour Martin Lipset
Basic Books, 403 pp., $8.95
Students in Revolt
edited by Seymour Martin Lipset, edited by Philip G. Altbach
Houghton Mifflin, 561 pp., $8.95
The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970
by Seymour Martin Lipset, by Earl Raab
Harper & Row, 576 pp., $12.50
Political Order in Changing Societies
by Samuel P. Huntington
Yale, 488 pp., $12.50
This is not criticism, but self-criticism. The passage comes from the Preface by S.M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan to a collection of conference papers on political sociology, published in 1968.[1] It provokes a number of interesting questions. What kind of science is it, one may ask, that can be so completely overthrown, in the space of a few months, by a student revolt? And if it has been overthrown, if the events of 1968 do really oblige us to revise fundamentally the theories, models, and methods of research in political sociology, what new ideas and approaches are to be discovered in the work of Lipset himself, who was, in the 1950s and the early 1960s, one of the chief exponents of those notorious doctrines, proclaiming the 'end of ideology' and the achievement of 'stable democracy' in the Western industrial countries,[2] which are now to be abandoned? More widely, what alternative theories have emerged in the social sciences to take the place of the discredited views which Lipset once propounded?
Review, 3510 words
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