Word: modernizations
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...this nuclear age, war is no longer a feasible choice, says Mills; we must have total peace. He holds that the history of modern society can most readily be understood as the story of the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power. Mills is not appalled by this centralization of power in Russia and America; he thinks that it makes rational decision of world problems easier...
Agreeing with Thomas Mann that modern man defines himself in political terms, Mills vehemently asserts that "This world is political." He demands political thought and activity from intellectuals: "In slowly drifting periods of man's history, it was possible that leaders be mediocrities and no one know it or care: "What great difference did it make? But in periods which are neither slow nor necessarily drifting, the fact is that leaders may very well make the difference between life and death...
...medium and high-rental suites will enable the Houses to meet their financial requirements by letting those who can afford it shoulder most of the burden. This "soak-the-rich" policy has long been Harvard's unofficial attitude toward the problem, and it seems foolish, just because of uniform, modern Quincy House, to let thirty years of hypocrisy go down the drain...
This resemblance between scholarship and classical rugged individualism is more than metaphorical. Institutionally Riesman has noted the resistance of universities to modern industrial psychology, to planners and adjusters and programmers, reformers who want to "integrate" the institution. The university still believes in the classical law of supply and demand, and it still regards its job as completely impersonal, a matter of filling the logistic demands of society for a certain number of trained executives and technicians, no matter what the cost in frustration and humiliation to teachers or students...
...this emphasis on individual work and achievement makes the scholar peculiarly fitted to act as social elevator boy in modern society. Parents who seeks paths by which their children can transcend the increasingly rigid stratification of American society have discovered that education is practically the only road to the top. Only in the schools can the youngster learn to prefer competition and success to complacency and group approval. And only by succeeding in school can he convince the marketplace that he has the talents it demands. Indeed, the symbolic degree has become so important that even those born...