Book Reviews 101

The authors repeatedly accuse social scientists of failing to examine the epistemologies and ideological assumptions that “underlie” their procedures. Perhaps this association should be accorded some weight, but the reader would be more sympathetic if the authors own assumptions were more clearly spelled out. Since the authors play the game of assumption assignments when discussing social scientists, it seems only reasonable to treat their own work in a similar fashion.

If one were to assume that the world view of Jurgen Habermas is adequate, the recommendations the authors make about substituting consciousness raising for data gathering makes some sense; but the problems that attend Habermas’ consciousness theory of knowledge and legitimization make the recommendation highly problematic.

According to Habermas, the legitimatization of standards of behavior (norms) de- pends upon the communication community. Norms are legitimate, but to the extent that the members of the community after rational reflection and discourse, where all terms are heard, agree that such norms should prevail. Still, we might agree with Habermas that such a procedure, providing it could be carried out, would guarantee general objec- tivity of interests. The conclusion need not be drawn that all mankind should constitute a single communication community. It could, in fact, turn out that the interest of individu- als who make up a communication community would be best served by the domination and exploitation of some other group! Furthermore, it could be contended that individ- uals who are members of some Third World communication community would be better off if they joined ours and abandoned their current behavior, thought, and feeling patterns. It might well be that these very patterns have created the problems faced by some or all of these collectivities.

C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian By Irving Horowitz

Boston: The Free Press, 1983,341 pp., $19.95

Reviewed by Ford W. Cleere, University of Northern Colorado

Here is a book to fuel old angers and controversies about the most controversial figure in American social science since Thorstein Veblen. It will also raise questions for some about the author. Can the author of this intellectual biography (or largely so) be the same sociologist who proclaimed in 1962, the year of Mills’ death, that Mills was the greatest sociologist America had ever known?

Two decades later, Horowitz sees Mills in far more tempered terms and explores his down side-the abrasiveness to people that so turned off a number of friends and associates, a Don Juan sexism. Horowitz seems to have joined the sociological estab- lishment in his cool and somewhat disdainful view of Mills’ political struggles such as his interest in revolutionary Cuba, for example.

Is this change in evaluation due to closer inspection of the evidence from a diversity of sources, a true scholarly evolution based on maturation and reflection? Or is it a sad modification of onetime radical sympathies that gloried in the courage and moral ho- nesty of Mills’ published iconoclastic works? Is it, in short, a trimming of ideological sails to deal with changing winds?

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Young social scientists will have their eyes opened by the treatment Mills received from the hands of some noted establishment sociologists. He had committed the unpar- donable sin of writing as a popularizer, a vulgarizer of sociology to a journalistic level in books such as Listen, Yankee! which sold 400,000 copies. There is a noticeable reserve and lack of enthusiasm displayed by the author here. One gets the feeling that Horowitz may not be firmly in the camp of the mandarins, but there is movement in this direction. He attempts to show by pure assertion-no evidence cited-that the claim that Mills was the leading referent for the American New Left was merely “myth.”

Horowitz does a masterful job discussing Mills’ intellectual explorations and ambiva- lent interactions over time with pragmatism and Marxism. He became disillusioned with the Marxian credo that the hope for social change rested with the organized working class, a belief he came to label as the “Marxian metaphysic.” In America at least, he concluded, labor leadership was just not up to the job of revolutionary transformation, citing labor’s acquiescence during the McCarthy period of the purges of Left labor leaders as one example.

Horowitz finds Mills main theoretical contribution to sociology to be in the area of social stratification through such books as White Collar and The Power Elite. His political struggles and his radical critique of American society are discussed briefly. Mills scorned value-free pretensions of establishment sociology and, without apology, sought to integrate moral judgments with empirical research.

Mills was the first American sociologist to be read and seriously discussed by Euro- pean intellectuals. He was as well known in the literary establishment of Greenwich Village as he was at meetings of the American Sociological Association.

This book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of Mills. Horowitz deserves credit for considerable research. It is definitely not the final word nor was it intended to be. Horowitz writes in the beginning that the ignored parts of Mills’ life and thought are for others to write about in the future.

The Spellbinders: Charismatic Poliial leadership By Ann Ruth Willner New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984,212 pp., $17.95

Reviewed by Patricia Wasielewski, University of Redlands

Many scholars have been intrigued by the idea of charisma. Most, however, have found gathering empirical data on the topic nearly impossible. The very fact that Willner tries to muster empirical evidence to illustrate the development of charisma sets this book apart from most previous analyses of the subject. Willner draws upon a wide range of historical and descriptive data, the best of which she personally gathered through years of observing Sukarno of Indonesia. The examples drawn from these data are definitely the strong suit of the book.

Also to Willner’s advantage are her logical organization and clear writing. In Chapter I she defines charisma and in Chapter 2 attempts to develop operational criteria for studying it. Both chapters set the stage for a discussion of the book’s major thesis in Chapter 3. Here Willner examines the emergence of charisma, her main focus being the