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This paper formalizes Lipset's theory of political extremism and applies its axioms and derivations to guide empirical research. A latent structure analysis of measures of the issues from a survey of the 1992 U.S. electorate produced a three-class Left-Center-Right classification of voters. Given that ideological consistency may indicate a propensity toward political extremism, this study finds that this propensity now is strongest in the Right class and not in the Left and Center classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author examines leaders in the political history of world. who failed to consolidate democracy in order to identify what tools they were missing. The author remarks that sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset uses U.S. President George Washington's success to argue that charismatic leaders can play an indispensable role in consolidating fledgling democracies. By applying Lipset's idea to Japanese and Italian political history, the author shows how the consolidation of fascism was both the product of failed leaders and the success of those who understood how to modify the past into a functional and resilient present. Italian leader, Giovanni Giolitti and Japanese leader, Hara Takashi were the last important liberal politicians. If Giolitti pioneered Italy's characteristic openings to the left, Hara pioneered Japan's equally characteristic politics of compensation and accommodation. Hara and Giovanni, two consummate politicians, had failed to be sufficiently creative. Both men cut their teeth as domestic policy bureaucrats in the first flush of national industrial development.

To understand Marx's unique approach to the empirical study of socioeconomic phenomena, it is necessary to delineate the roles played by both philosophic speculation and scientific inquiry in his work. In this paper, Marxism as both "philosophy" and "science" will be considered in some detail, in order to illuminate the strengths and shortcomings of each approach for the understanding of social change The notion of praxis will be introduced as a way of bridging the two concerns I shall argue that the various equations that comprise Marx's economic framework do not permit predictions concerning inevitable outcomes of capitalist economic production This is because Marx's economic categories are at the same time reflections of social and political relationships, the values assigned to the former result in part from the latter, while themselves determining the limits within which the latter operate To understand Marx as a scientist reducing capitalism to formal economic equations is to misread him as an economic determinist, to regard him as a philosopher focusing on reification and false consciousness is to ignore his central concern with necessary economic processes Thus, I shall argue that Marx's work---as exemplified in Capital---constitutes a methodology capable of combining science's concern with lawful necessity, and philosophy's insistence on the possibilities for human freedom from external constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short paper presents a few of the issues which divide contemporary Marxists and shows how their debates relate to Marx's original work In the first part, I discuss the family, law and the world system in the light of two notions of social structure. In the second part, I consider the dynamics of capitalism and the struggles between classes, races and genders as potential motors of change. This is followed by an outline of Marx's understanding of the persistence of capitalism, the notion of reproduction of social relations, and how the state becomes involved in the organization of struggles and in the preservation of the conditions of accumulation In the final part, the past is examined for the light it may shed on the future Has history a prior purpose, or telos? How did Marx and how do Marxists conceive of the transition from one period of history to another? What can we say about the transition to socialism based on the experience of the last hundred years? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is the first empirical attempt to assess divisions in sociology. In this work, I use semistructured interviews with departmental executive officers (heads and chairs) at 27 of the top 50 ranked Sociology departments to gain a better understanding of the divisions that departments face and, to by extension, the discipline more generally. The most salient source of conflict is between a vision of sociology that incorporates activism and a political perspective into the work and one that believes that valuable research is objective and does not advocate for a political perspective. Concerns centered on qualitative and quantitative methodological differences or concerns focused on sociology's (in)coherence were secondary to the activism versus science split. The conflict manifests in its most pronounced manner when the evaluation of work is required (e.g., hiring, promotion, and merit). One viable prescription may be for departments to be explicit in their expectations, their criteria for evaluation, and the relative weights of these various components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an academic memoir of the author. The author's parents were both born in the Soviet Union in Minsk and Pinsk. The author's mother came to the U.S. as a young child in 1907. The author's father arrived as a young adult in the U.S. in 1911. The two strands, Judaism and Marxism that concerned the author's parents had an impact on him. Political parties were an eye opener to the author. It seemed to explain two questions, why the Soviet Union had become a dictatorship after the Russian revolution, and why the social democratic parties were so inept at fighting for socialism. Most of the political analysis in the author's work on Saskatchewan helped to explain the occurrence in the midwest of populism and other forms of agrarian radicalism on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. In his analysis of sociopolitical development, the author noted that the study of development did not involve just looking at developing countries of the Third World.

In this article the author comments on the views of sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset on working-class authoritarianism. Lipset's article "Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism", facilitates the discussion on the relation between class and political values. According to Lipset, if liberalism is conceived as a preference for economic redistribution, the working class is more liberal than the middle class. There is a need to examine whether the economic liberalism of the working class is generated by its weak economic position and whether its authoritarianism is indeed a result of its limited cultural capital. If economic liberalism really is caused by a weak economic position, the previously recorded effect of occupational class on economic liberalism should be attributable to labor market differences between the classes. Charts indicating authoritarianism or libertarianism and economic liberalism or conservatism are presented. The fact that working-class authoritarianism is mainly an authoritarianism of the poorly educated is evident from studies on authoritarianism, racial prejudice, and tolerance of nonconformity, three strongly interrelated variables.

This article presents information related to the book "It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States," by Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, an effort to understand why socialism failed in the U.S., while it succeeded, with opportunities to govern, in other major industrial societies and English-speaking democracies. Lipset's book "Reinhard Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society," took up one major thesis in an attempt to explain the failure of socialism in the U.S. The key distinction between Lipset and his fellow socialists is between commitment to an empirical analysis and, alternatively, the use and deployment of large arguments in an analytical, polemical, or rhetorical mode. When one considers "It Didn't Happen Here," from the point of view of intellectual history, and from the point of view of our changing understanding of why socialism failed in the U.S., the book is rather silent. It deals directly with the power of the analysis and arguments that have been devoted to the subject. That, according to the author, certainly deserves extended and serious consideration.