Search

The article presents the autobiography of the sociologist Jan Szczepanski on the tribulations of a Polish sociologist. He started to study philosophy and sociology in 1932 at the University of Poznan, Poland, under Florian Znaniecki. He received the M.A. degree on the basis of a paper on the semantics of Husserl, and the Ph.D. degree on the basis of a dissertation entitled "The Idea of the Milieu in Rural Sociology," written under the direction of Professor Znaniecki in 1939. Both these works, prepared for printing in 1939, were lost during the war and have never been published, only several articles appearing at that time. He brought with him from his home an interest in rural sociology. His father possessed a small farm in the mountain locality of Ustron in Silesia. Work on this farm was therefore his first experience of any social importance. Sociology in Poland was quickly reconstructed. During the first post-war years the author wrote two textbooks, "Development of the Methods of Sociology" and "History of Social Thought in the Nineteenth Century." However, after the turn towards Stalinism, the publication of the manuscripts proved impossible. Instead he published many papers, and wrote in the weeklies, taking part directly in political discussions and polemics.

The article presents an account of the book "A History of Psychology in Autobiography," vol. 4., by Walter V.D. Bingham, Edwin G. Boring, Cyril Burt, Richard M. Elliott, Agostino Gemelli, Arnold Gesell, Clark L. Hull, Walter S. Hunter, David Katz, Albert Michotte, Jean Piaget, Henri Pieron, Godfrey Thomson, L. L. Thurstone and Edward C. Tolman.

The article discusses about a comparative study of motivations as revealed in thematic appreciation and autobiography. This study represents an attempt to define more clearly the possibilities of the Thematic Apperception Test and autobiography for research in the dynamic aspects of behavior. It seems clear that these two instruments do not reveal the same aspects of personality. For better understanding of the exact nature of these devices it is essential that their areas of usefulness be more clearly and exactly defined.

The article presents autobiographical profile of the anthropolist M.N. Srinivas. He is concerned in this brief essay with narrating how he became a sociologist and how he grew in the discipline. He has brought in his personal and domestic life only to the extent that it is relevant to understanding his career. He has also not discussed his contribution on the purely technical side but confined himself to describing his activities as an organizer of sociological studies in two Indian universities and elsewhere, and the work he did for strengthening the profession in India. He finds even this difficult as he has to steer clear of the Scylla of egotism and the Charybdis of undue modesty. If the former is vulgar the latter is dishonest. The author owes his career in sociology to his delicate health during boyhood and adolescence. As a scholar progresses in his academic life, he finds to his dismay an increasing amount of his time being spent on matters other than his studies and research. Ever since the author's return home in 1951 he has been torn between two conflicting desires, one, to make such contribution as he could to the building up of a national sociological tradition, and the other, to his own study and research.

The article presents the autobiography of the author, Wilbert E. Moore. An invitation to write an autobiography provides an excuse for retrospective reconstruction that could lead to distortion. In this essay at presentation of the self, or at least the professional self, the author strives valiantly for candor, for no other style would befit one passionately committed to the dispassionate observation and analysis of the regularities and irregularities in the human condition. The author testifies to being committed to a calling, with all that entails by way of attitude and belief as well as the mandates of competence and performance. His career has been almost exclusively academic, and in that career he has been aware of a behavioral norm that is summarized as the pressure to publish or the equally alliterative admonition "publish" or "perish." Sociology as a discipline is accused of being irrelevant, or relevant for the wrong interest and ideologies; of being complacent while the world collapses; of being inattentive to the demands of the young, the disaffected, the disadvantaged. Some of these charges have a grain of truth, but the animus behind them often strikes me as destructive and corrupt. The author's basic view is that the only tolerable adjectival qualifiers attached to the term sociology refer to substantive specialties and never to ideological stances.

The article presents an autobiographical intellectual sketch by a cosmopolitan German sociologist, Rene Konig. The circumstance which was of decisive significance for the author's intellectual development was undoubtedly the fact that he was born astride a frontier as the son of a German father and a French mother. That is of particular importance for a future sociologist because, right from the outset, this dual upbringing enables him to see that, even in a comparatively uniform culture like the European, a variety of solutions for certain of life's elementary problems are equally possible. These solutions are neither better nor worse, but simply different. Of course a child is not capable of reflecting on such questions; it simply reacts to experience by adapting itself to the given cultural context and then consistently applying the logic of the given cultural situation. This is of course true in the first place of language, in that a child who is brought up bilingually tends to answer in the language in which he is addressed. But it also gives a particular turn to his subconscious attitudes. If that is how one begins, there is little difficulty in carrying on in the same way.

It is flattering to be asked to write an autobiographical intellectual profile. Two of the author's major intellectual concerns coincide with the position represented by the "International Social Science Journal," and therefore presumably also by many of its readers. The first is that significant problems can rarely, if ever, be adequately understood from the standpoint of a single discipline, and that an interdisciplinary approach is essential. The second is that the ethnocentrism which usually accompanies one's national identity must be replaced by a cross-cultural, international perspective. It is to these concerns that major attention is directed in the profile that follows. The author's earliest research and first publications dealt with the problem of alleged inborn psychological differences between races. His interest in alleged genetic psychological differences between ethnic groups led directly to a concern with intergroup relations, stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination and from this it was an easy step to the study of relations between nations. In fact the two sets of problems cannot really be separated.

This article presents information on the book titled "My Life in Two Worlds," authored by Francis Neilson. It is opined that a more fitting title for this autobiography would have been My Life in Twenty-Two Worlds, for there seems scarcely a phase of human activity in which, during that crowded and questing career, he has not played some part. It is informed that Francis was born in Birkenhead, that ship-building and shipping community which confronts Liverpool across the Mersey, and has been known all through its history as the city of the future. In the recounting of his Parliamentary years, Francis has much to say of the interest of many of his great contemporaries, but of none more than that of Winston Churchill, for both were young Liberal candidates and young Members in a day of unexpected opportunity for the younger men of their philosophy and party. Francis calls himself a rebel: he has always been, and remains, a rebel. But his is a revolt, not against sound established order, but against narrowness, abuses, restraints and restrictions.

The article presents personal experiences of the author in the boarding houses of Port Erin, Isle of Man where they stayed for an indefinite period-with nothing whatever to do. The men had the chance of earning sh 1.7 per day. The author and his mates had been clamoring for regular paid work since May. Now, in September, there was still no prospect of it with winter, and a curfew moving up to five in the afternoon, impending. Besides, many of them had come to the end of our savings. Nothing undermines self-respect so much as not having a penny to spend. The camp authorities distributed some sanitary articles. For cleaning their shoes the landladies' floor polish did well enough. The idea of the "Service Exchange" was simple enough on the surface: instead of everybody doing everything for herself, let each do what she knows how to do best and exchange it for what the others know how to do better. Thus boldly the author and his colleagues create nothing less than art artificial market economy. Perhaps this was the first scheme for diversified productive unemployment relief.

This article presents a research note on attitudes to work and marriage of six hundred adolescent girls from one of the Home Counties, England and a county in the West of England. Their ages ranged from fourteen to seventeen years and the majority were due to leave their Modern, Technical or Grammar school during the following year. The study was carried out by a research group at Birkbeck College Department of Psychology in the Spring of 1956, assisted by a grant from the Nuffield Foundation and generated data based on the responses of the interviewees. The data was collected via two techniques, an autobiographical essay in which the children were asked to imagine that they were near the end of their lives and to write their life stories from the time they left school, and with the help of questionnaires concerned with occupational choices and expectations for the future.

If people were to take a fresh look at Lincoln Steffens' life and thought, it would be helpful to re-examine some of the mythology that has grown up about the muckraker. A number of authors, for example, have contended that Steffens was an uncritical admirer of prime minister of Italy Benito Mussolini. The root of the misconception may be traced to John Chamberlain's 1932 view that Steffens' sympathy for the Russian revolution was balanced by the idea that a solution could be found in Mussolini's coercive State. Steffens, especially in his "Autobiography," and to a lesser extent in his letters, expressed favorable views of Mussolini's Italy. In 1925 he wrote privately that observers should watch and learn from the Fascist Duce and he asserted that Mussolini had sought to utilize methods the Soviets had formulated. But he also stated to Brand Whitlock that Mussolini had no worthwhile objective. During the following few years Steffens increasingly took an anti-fascist stance and opposed fascism in Germany and Italy.

The article focuses on the life and works of Ellis Clyde Persing, an educator and author in the field of natural science and a well known teacher in the Cleveland, Ohio. Persing was born on November 17, 1885 in Snydertown, Pennsylvania. He received an A. B. degree from Buckwell University in 1911 and an M. S. degree from the University of Chicago in 1926. His major interest were conservation education in elementary and secondary schools and photography and color photography in the secondary schools. Persing died on April 4, 1956 because of stroke.