The Ordeal of Overgeneralization

John Murray Cuddihy, " The Ordeal of Civility—Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity, " New York: Basic Books, 1974.

THE "SOFT" SOCIAL SCIENCES—psychology, sociology, history, etc. are in the need of development of critical standards analagous to the empirical standards of the physical sciences. When a physicist isolates one variable for study, develops a body of evidence and acquires an insight into the nature of physical reality, one desideratum is a replicable empirical test. Can he make predictions which can be duplicated by all observers? When Einstein theorized the constancy of the speed of light and the relativity of all other measurements, he predicted the bending of light in the neighborhood of the sun. The world became convinced when observation demonstrated that light does bend.

In the social and human sciences, flights of fancy are not only forgiveable, but need to be encouraged. The creative juices flow and new categories are invented and manipulated. Sometimes extraordinary insight is gained. Reality is so ambiguous and holistic that any system wrenched free can be easily criticized as reductionistic. This is a cheap shot. But social science is not a free-for-all either. There must be some standard of criticism.

Let me propose two standards: (1) A pragmatic standard; i.e., something can be understood better using the proposed set of abstractions; and (2) A poetic standard, i.e., this set of categories activates imagination instead of foreclosing it. By both of these standards John Murray Cuddihy's The Ordeal of Civility fails.

His underlying explanatory "discovery" is the ethnic similarity of three seminal critics of the West—Marx, Freud and Levi-Strauss. He notes that they are of Jewish extraction and evidently believes that this explains the powerful, monumental thrust of their intellectual achievements. He argues that Jewish emancipation was