Arien Mack, Editor
Today at least a third, possibly half, of the world’s population lives under regimes that, however subject to political change, appear indissolubly wedded to socialism as an economic system. When we look not towards socialism’s outwards manifestations of success, but to its inward state of mind, there is no doubt that socialism is in crisis. Among the individuals who are, so to speak, the fathers of the socialist faith, there is visible crise de foi.
Liberalism in economics can, roughly speaking, be equated with the so called “new economics.” It is the economics which fought its way against the orthodoxies that prevailed for some 60 years before 1935—in America, in Britain, in Scandinavia, the The Netherlands, and to a degree in Germany.
Orthodox economics tries to show that the markets allocate scarce resources according to relative efficiency; Political economics tries to show that markets distribute income according to relative power. While it is good to know about efficiency, in the world we live in, it tends to be subservient to power. By failing to appreciate this, and consequently failing to also to accord the distribution of labor between income and capital a properly central role, orthodox economics has become cut off from the central economic issues of our time.
This article discusses the urgent need for reform in regards to subsidizing college students in the US where there is a demonstrable need for subsidy to college students, the present system does not meet the need, or meets its inefficiently. Many of the most important differences are associated with geographic, sexual, racial, ethnic, and economic representation in higher education.
Alexander Alland Jr.
Discusses the work of Konrad Lorenz, who attempts to draw a synthesis between the biological heritage in human behavior and its expression in culture. The work contrasts this with Robert Ardey, who seeks to understand man’s biology in order to understand human behavior in all of its facets.
Up to now most of interest in sociology in Eastern Europe has centered on the Soviet Union. The comparative neglect of other socialist countries is particularly unfortunate in the case of Polish sociology, both because its achievements are so much more notable than those of its Russian counterparts and because it is of great significance to those concerned with the general development of socialism in Poland. In Polish sociology, there is inter alia the institutionalized provision of an intelligent critical commentary on the construction of socialism in Poland.
The clarification of the relationship between mental and physical events is a problem which the social sciences inherited from philosophy. Both monistic and dualistic solutions have been proposed. The monists maintain that the nature of reality can be explained exclusively in terms of either mental or physical phenomena. The dualists make a distinction between mental and physical events and may maintain that distinct methods of investigation are required. Dualism took its most rigid form in the Cartesian parallelism between the mind and body.
A critical study of the relationship between Georg Simmel and Max Weber is long overdue. Such a study should not serve not only to bring out the full extent of Simmel’s influence upon Weber but, more importantly, to elucidate how and why the two acknowledged masters of German sociology, both stemming from a neo-Kantian tradition, arrived at radically disparate conceptions of the nature of the scope of sociology.
In recent years, there has been an enormous rise in both the number of people traveling for pleasure and the number of countries and places visited regularly by tourists. Sociologists, however seem to have neglected the study of tourism as a social phenomenon. Here I should like to propose a general theoretical approach to the phenomenon of international tourism, one which includes a typology of tourists on the basis of their relationship to both the tourist business establishment and the host countries.
Whatever the ultimate evaluation of the conference on the Weimar Republic held last year at the New School, few in attendance could remain unimpressed by the variety and direct influence or symbolic importance of many Weimer phenomena. In the words of Peter Gay, whose study Weimar Culture has reflected as well as inspired increased interest in the period, the Weimar Republic died only recently—"yet it is already a legend.” Indeed, the variety of phenomena associated with the Weimar years “memorable artifacts” as well as the “tragic death” may make it arbitrary to view them within the framework of a specific historical period or geographical area.
The time that has passed since the fall of the Nazi regime is more than twice as long as the time of its existence. Yet the twelve years of the Third Reich represent a problem for a moral conscience and intellectual comprehension that outweighs all the problems of the postwar years—event-filled and difficult as they’ve been.