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This paper analyzes how authority can be maintained by structuring reality through continuous violent conflict. Using Lewis Coser's reformulation of Simmers propositions on fostering continuous conflict as a raison d'ètre in sect-like struggle groups as a general frame of analysis, the Stalinist case is then examined in order to evaluate systematically these propositions in a societal context and to specify the morphology of violence as a method of conflict. By examining a societal context, it is noted that instability in the social structure not only can be a condition for the legitimacy of a problematic political leadership and system, but also simultaneously be a consequence of a form of preventive punitive sanctioning, whereby potential threats, both persons and alternative courses of action, are eliminated before they become present dangers. In turn, an official definition of reality, justifying leadership and system, is constructed through the public documentation of a conspiracy, which employs invented categories to demonstrate ideological continuity and fabricates pseudo events to demonstrate indispensability in fulfilling necessary functions. This public documentation of a conspiracy is then used as a facade for a larger plan of social prophylaxis that implicates the public as well as the police in ferreting out tangible and visible enemies to fill the invented categories in the pseudo events. As public complicity conjoins with the official definition of reality, commitment to the leadership and system is acquired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically discusses essays published in the November 2, 1992 issue of the journal "Sociological Forum." The author criticizes writers who cite and quote themselves extensively. The present issue presents a remarkable set of review essays. They appear as three pairs, in the first pair, Jonathan Rieder reflects on the writing of a book about a Brooklyn neighborhood published in 1985, while Philip Kasinitz compares three recent books about urban neighborhoods. In the second pair, Lewis Coser writes about collective memory, with special reference to Maurice Halbwachs, White Alan Wolfe examines Eviatar Zerubavels book on how people make distinctions. In the third pair, Dennis Wrong looks back to David Riesmans' "The Lonely Crowd," first published in 1950, then Riesman himself reflects on these books history.