Word: lipset
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...advance the art, Hal Lipset, a seasoned San Francisco private eye, maintains a laboratory behind a false warehouse front where his eavesdropping "genius," Ralph Bertsche, works out new gimmicks such as a high-powered bug that fits into a pack of filter-tip cigarettes. It is padded to feel soft and shows the ends of real cigarettes to reassure a suspicious businessman or divorce-prone spouse-provided he doesn't ask for a smoke. Bertsche believes that bugs in time may be no bigger than a pencil eraser, recorders as small as a cigarette lighter...
...Martin Lipset and Leo Lowenthal have edited a volume of critical essays that, by its list of contributors, goes far to show Riesman as a publicly accepted members of his profession. It also makes equally clear that his confederates do not consider him a very good social theorist...
...Study of the Changing American Character. As Ralf Dahrendorf explains, "Comte Alexis de Tocqueville and Mr. David Riesman share a number of their questions, and many of their answers too; but whereas Mr. Riesman does not mind the former, he seems rather less than pleased with the latter." Lipset documents the similarities of nineteenth-century observations to Riesman's description. Parsons and White talk about the continuity of values. Nobody doubts that changes have occurred, but these writers question whether Riesman has described them accurately, and whether the American character has really altered...
Gentlemen & Scholars. If U.S. intellectuals ever had a right to feel oppressed, says Lipset, it was in the late 19th century, when Henry Adams eloquently brooded over the rise of the so-called "robber barons." The anti-intellectualism of that day was the cold contempt of unlettered men (whose scions later gave millions to universities). The result-since the U.S. lacked a conservative tradition -was to fill intellectuals, from Wilson through Roosevelt, with liberal reformist zeal. But the anti-intellectualism of today is no longer contempt for a low-status group. It is more likely fear of a high-status...
...Lipset sees evidence that "a significant minority [of U.S. intellectuals] have become conservative." One reason is continued prosperity, another the implacable nature of Communism, which encourages intellectuals "to defend an existing or past society against those who argue for a future Utopia. Like Burke, they have come to look for sources of stability. Only time will tell whether a permanent change in the relationship of the American intellectual to his society is in process. There will still remain the inherent tendencies to oppose the status quo. Any status quo embodies rigidities and dogmatisms which intellectuals have an inalienable right...