Word: andreski
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Stanislav Andreski is no believer in what he calls "the principle that dog does not eat dog," the unwritten code that keeps members of the same profession from attacking each other in public even if attack is justified. A professor of sociology at England's Reading University, Andreski has just written a new book that is certain to enrage his colleagues. In Social Sciences as Sorcery (Andre Deutsch; London; ?2.95), he accuses the world's rapidly increasing population of social scientists of writing more and more about less and less. Their work, he says, is boring, misleading, pseudoscientific...
...Andreski does not linger long in generalities; he documents his charges and spares few of the luminaries of social science in the process. For instance, he finds the patriarch of modern sociology, Talcott Parsons, guilty of "monumental muddleheadedness" and of making "the simplest truth appear unfathomably obscure." What particularly riles Andreski about Parsons is his "voluntaristic theory of action," which in essence states that to understand behavior it is necessary to take into account men's wishes, beliefs, resources and decisions. This idea, writes Andreski, represents "an important step in the mental development of mankind, but it must have...
Critical Eye. Also taken roundly to task are such respected men as Paul Lazarsfeld (a co-author of Personal Influence) and his colleagues. "After wading through mounds of tables and formulae," Andreski complains, "we come to the general finding (expressed of course in the most abstruse manner possible) that people enjoy being in the centre of attention, or that they are influenced by those with whom they associate...which I can well believe, as my grandmother told me that many times when I was a child...
Johns Hopkins Psychiatrist Jerome D. Frank, who shares many of Andreski's views, is convinced that a major nuclear exchange is inevitable unless nations stop building nuclear arsenals. "Nothing is more certain and inexorable than the law of chance," Frank writes in Sanity & Survival, his recent study of human aggression. "Present policies involve a continuing risk of nuclear war; the longer the risk continues, the greater the probability of war; and if the probability continues long enough, it approaches certainty...
...such men as Andreski, Frank and Bouthoul present the case for war? Not because they believe in war-certainly none of them do-but because they entertain the view that war is an inevitable adjunct, and in many ways the architect, of the civilization that man has built. When asked if he really believes that war is beneficial, Andreski replies: "That depends on whether you think technological civilization is beneficial. Personally, I like it, but I'm not convinced it is a viable creation. It may destroy itself." Destruction was the first and still remains the cardinal function...