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Intended as a textbook for introductory courses in the social sciences, this excellent volume can be read with pleasure and profit by the 'intelligent layman' and also by that far rarer breed, the intelligent specialist.
Leaning heavily on the data and methods of sociology, the authors have managed to enrich their work with valuable insights from anthropology, economics, history, literature, politics, and psychology. The book represents not only an unusually happy collaboration between two scholars who wear their erudition lightly but also a synthesis of various disciplines which are ordinarily monopolized by narrow specialists.
It is especially refreshing to point out that this book does not dispense the usual sociological bromides on sociometrics and industrial sociology. Thus, the labor-management studies at the Hawthorne works of the Western Electric Company in the nineteen twenties are mentioned only summarily and can be consulted at greater length in the original publications and in the numerous textbooks which have devoted much space to them. Such labor-management studies are empirical and 'scientific' (i.e., statistical yet moot), but they are also cozy, compulsive, and conservative, being sponsored by management and concerned with its special problems.
Ross and van den Haag, on the other hand, are motivated by a deep-seated humanism and radicalism which are in the best tradition of the American past. (Radicalism is meant as going to the roots of a problem and not as a doctrinaire or conformist nonconformity.) This humanistic radicalism, fused with a rigorous dedication to