Take note, Doug, there can be a lucrative future in writing shlock like this.
Jim Farmelant
On Thu, 24 Dec 1998 21:08:11 -0500 (EST) "Michael Hoover"
<hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us> writes:
>> A funny thing about Alan Wolfe is that he used to be
>> a Marxist. Back in the 1970s he wrote or co-authored at least
>> a couple of Marxist-oriented textbooks on politics. This all
>> Jim Farmelant
>
>Wolfe was part of 'insurgency' in US poli sci in late 60s & early
>70s that resulted in Caucus for a New Political Science...he was
>also part of Kapitalistate collective (if memory serves) which put
>out a good journal for awhile...I benefitted from a number of his
>works from that period, including:
>
>An End to Political Science (ed. with Marvin Surkin)
>Political Analysis: An Unorthodox Approach (written with Charles
>McCoy)
>Seamy Side of Democracy: Repression in America
>Limits of Legitimacy: Political Contradictions of Contemporary
>Capitalism
>Rise & Fall of Soviet Threat: Domestic Sources of the Cold War
>Consensus
>America's Impasse: Rise & Fall of the Politics of Growth (premature
>subtitle?)
>
>by late 80s, he was a 'civil society' guy (see Whose Keeper? Social
>Science & Moral Obligation)...basic argument: principal responsibility
>for human development muust be assigned neither to the market (US),
>nor
>to government (Scandinavia), but to moral and social relations of
>said civil society...where market or gov't ceases being servant of
>civil society and begins to replace its essential functions, loss of
>moral agency and weakened human bonding results, life becomes less
>tolerable...Wolfe includes family. commnity customs, rituals of
>friendship & mutual concern as part of civil society...in US, he
>finds family breakdown stemming from invasion of commercial values
>at expense of mutual commitment while in Scandanavia, children &
>elderly becomes wards of impersonbal bureaucracy...Wolfe says
>latter is preferable to former, but question of personal moral
>responsibility and loss of 'something essential' to society via
>institutional appropriation remain...this begins to sound like the
>smarmy communitarianism of Amitai Etzioni...Michael Hoover
>
___________________________________________________________________ You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail. Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]