Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority. By Margaret Mead.  McGraw-Hill, 1951.  148 pp. $4.00.

“A nation,” according to St. Augustine in “The City of God,” “is an association of reasonable beings united in peaceful sharing of the things they cherish. Therefore, to determine the quality of a nation you must consider what those things are.” Margaret Mead and an interdisciplinary team have attempted in this small but weighty volume to investigate currently held (and cherished) attitudes towards authority held by the Soviets. This kind of study, which includes contributions from the social and political scientists, historians and literary analysts, was instituted by Ruth Benedict. It was Benedict who first saw the possibility of studying cultures, inaccessible to field exploration because of the war, in this highly co-operative and ingenious way. Mead, using her vast knowledge of society and culture, is ably continuing in this method of study since the untimely death of Benedict in 1948.

Using an anthropological frame of reference which Mead defends in Chapter 2, six areas of the Soviet culture were investigated: 1) the Party; 2) leadership in agriculture; 3) industrial organizational problems; 4) standards for parental behavior