Volume 8, Number 11 · June 15, 1967
In the Life
By Barrington Moore
La Vida
by Oscar Lewis
Random House, 669 pp., $10.00
If historians still exist fifty years from now, one of them might conceivably select two closely related trends as the dominant features of the period through which we are now living. By the 1960s, advanced capitalist society had succeeded, with the help of a prolonged war boom, in absorbing and neutralizing its own industrial proletariat, never in any case a really serious revolutionary threat. Simultaneously, on the other hand, the leading capitalist country had begun to spawn a new, dark-skinned proletariat in the heartland of its own cities and to use its terrifying military power to crush revolutionary uprisings among the wretched of the earth in the far parts of the globe. At the very least this perspective on our own time makes very relevant Oscar Lewis's latest book, La Vida. Lewis has gradually become the foremost anthropological student of those who are wretched. His phrase, 'the culture of poverty,' has become household property in quarters very remote from those of professional social scientists.
Review, 2965 words
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