Abstracts of Articles in This Issue

s of Articles in This Issue Insiders and Outsiders

The social relevance of perspective established in the sociology of knowledge becomes evident during times of great social change and conflict. Conflict makes for a total functionalizing of thought which is interpreted only in terms of its alleged social, economic, political, or psychological sources and functions. Deepened social conflict today renews the relevance of an old problem in the sociology of knowledge: socially patterned differentials in access to new knowledge. As groups and collectivities become more self-conscious and solidary under conditions of social polarization, their members tend to claim unique or privileged access to certain kinds of knowledge. This can be described as the doctrine of the Insider, which includes the correlative claim that the Outsider has a structurally imposed incapacity for access to such knowledge. Outsider doctrine involves complementary claims of access to knowledge grounded on the assumption of socially based detachment. The rationale of the Insider doctrine is examined, with special reference to the advocates of a "black social science," a case taken as prototypical for other Insider doctrines based on sex, age, religion, nationality, etc. Structural analysis in terms of status sets indicates that Insider and Outsider doctrines based on affiliation with a single collectivity or occupancy of a single status are necessarily unstable and inadequate. The paper concludes by examining the distinctive interactive roles of Insiders and Outsiders that involve interchange, tradeoffs, and syntheses in the formation of social knowledge.

Radical Politics and Sociological Research
Howard S. Becker and Irving Louis Horowitz Sociological work producing results that are "true" in not being falsifiable by available evidence and "true to the world" in encompassing the major components of the phenomena it studies is likely to have a radical thrust. Such work unmasks the conventional stories with which institutional functionaries and social leaders hide the inequities and failures of the organizations for which they are responsible. In so doing, it serves to increase the possibilities for freedom and equality in a society. The radical thrust of good sociological work reveals itself in its choice of causes for analysis, since the designation of causes serves to assign blame for undesirable events and to suggest what might be attacked in order to prevent them from occurring.

The Politics of American Sociologists
Seymour Martin Lipset and Everett Carll Ladd, Jr.
Various critiques of American sociology, most recently that of Alvin Gouldner, argue that the domain assumptions of the field stemming Abstracts from the functionalist approach of Talcott Parsons have imposed an essentially conservative system maintenance set of concerns on the field. Gouldner suggests that Parsons's approach reflects a lifelong opposition to socialism. In fact, Parsons's personal history belies these contentions. Further, a variety of survey studies, including a major unpublished one by Gouldner, indicate that sociologists as a group have been the most left-disposed field in academe, an occupation which is to the left of other strata. Within sociology, the "achievers," those at the most prestigeous schools, who have published most, and have the most research funds, are to the left of others in the field. This pattern reflects a general characteristic of intellectual life in which the most successful people hold more unorthodox socially critical views, behavior which may stem from a link between creativity and heterodoxy. The fact that sociology is to the left of other fields may be inherent in the subject material it deals with, its distrust of reason, and its role as a debunker.

Professionalization of Sociology
Morris Janowitz Sociology has developed as an academic profession since its origin. This paper seeks to analyze the efforts of sociologists to create a practice specialty and to identify the intellectual, organizational, and professional barriers to an "applied sociology." Alternatively, the role of the sociologist as a "staff" professional is examined.

John R. Rhoads
This is a critical analysis of Gouldner's The Corning Crisis of Western Sociology. It exposes some of the author's misinterpretations of the historical development of social theory and presents evidence drawn largely from the original works of the theorists. It disputes Gouldner's principal conclusion that there is a crisis in academic sociology insofar as this conclusion rests on his faulty reconstruction of social theory. Some contentions this critique opposes to those presented by Gouldner are: sociological positivism took a broader perspective than that toward the utilitarianism of the middle class; the functional theory of classical sociology appeared elsewhere than in contexts characterized by the supremacy of the middle class over the aristocracy; Parsons's theory is not an antideterministic defense of capitalism and does recognize the autonomy of the individual.

Political Judgments and the Social Perceptions
Vernon K. Dibble Content analyses of 102 reports submitted to the Verein fuer Sozalpolitik during the 1880s and 1890s show that those authors who were more explicit in their value judgments were also more likely to perceive social relationships rather than aggregates of people. Among the professional officials, however, a different dynamic was at work. They were more likely to look to the state for the implementation of their policy recommendations. And authors who looked to the state were more likely to perceive relations rather than aggregates. These findings speak to certain wider issues in the history of sociology and the sociology of knowledge, including the transition of sociology away from its original value-laden stance, and the necessity for sociologists of knowledge to use quite different approaches toward the understanding of cognitions and of evaluative styles.

Early Marxist Thought
Lewis A. Coser This paper investigates Kautskyan Marxism, Bernsteinian revisionism, the teachings of Rosa Luxemburg and her co-thinkers, Russian Menshevism and Bolshevism, the political writings of Georg Lukacs, and those of Antonio Gramsci in terms of the societal milieu in which they originated, the social location of their authors, and the audiences and publics to which they addressed themselves. The revolutionary and activist Marxism first developed by Marx and Engels in the late 1840s found an echo among 20th-century intellectuals in those rimland areas of Europe which still resembled in essential respects the conditions prevailing in the heartland of Europe half a century earlier.
In the main centers of the European working class, on the other hand, positivistic evolutionary Marxism, adumbrated by Engels in the last period of his life and further developed by Kautsky, carried the day and was later largely replaced by Fabian or Bernsteinian gradualism. Social existence determined social consciousness. The receptivity to variant Marxist doctrine was largely conditioned by the values and attitudes of the men and women whose concrete social and historical existence was mirrored in their world view, whether as producers or as consumers of ideas.