Gino Germant, 1911–1979: Sociologist from the other America

This personal statement was prepared in response to a series of questions put forth to me by Ana Germani. She is the daughter of Gino and a good friend in her own right. However, she is not responsible for any part of this narrative. Ana is preparing a full-scale biography of Gino, in which I am sure the shortcomings in this brief memoir will be properly corrected. - ILH Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt distinguished professor emeritus of sociology and political science at Rutgers University, where he also serves as chairman of the board of Transaction Publishers. His most recent work is Behemoth: The History and Theory of Political Sociology.     

Shifting boundaries: Doing social science in the 1990s—A personal odyssey

Drawing on my own 40 years as a social scientist, I argue, as have others in recent years, that rather than a contaminant, one's own biography can be a useful tool in social analysis. I place my personal struggle with this issue in a larger cultural context and point to a shift in the boundaries between public and private, which has profound implications for the way we teach, write, and do research.Presidential address delivered at the Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meetings, Baltimore, Maryland, March 19, 1994.     

Changes in the world income distribution

Drawing on new international comparison estimates for 127 nations, this study examines in some detail for the decinnial years 1950–1980 the world size distribution of income. Different income concepts—national output valued in different ways, and also consumption alone; and income per-equivalent adult as well as per capita—have been considered in judging how world inequality has changed. The principal findings are: (i) at a point in time, the intercountry differences in income—differences among nations—are greater than the usually observed intracountry differences in income—differences within nations; and (ii) over time systematic differences in national economic growth rates of countries led on balance to very slightly increased intercountry inequality (quite possible not beyond the margin of measurement error) but that (and this judgment is quite tentative) the changes in intracountry inequality over time have left inequality in the overall distribution unchanged.     

State-independent subjective expected lexicographic utility

By enriching the set of acts deemed available at least as objects of assessment, we obtain a significant tightening of the linear lexicographic representation described in LaValle and Fishburn (1991a). Under the state-independent assumption that every outcome is available in every state, each state must be either completely null or completely essential (rather than lexicographically essential), and the matrices characterizing subjective probabilities of the states must be square and lower triangular with positive diagonal entries. It follows that there are straightforward generalizations of real-valued-probability relationships such as Bayes' theorem. Even in the tighter case, the matrix probabilities cannot be reduced to scalar matrices or even fully diagonal matrices. Nevertheless, they are easy to work with and permit fully consequentialist decision analysis of problems in which preferences are non-Archimedean.     

Social Class and Attitudes toward Mental Illness: a Study of a Canadian Prairie Community*

A partir d'entrevues obtenues auprés d'une population adulte échantillonnée au hasard, vivant dans une petite ville typiques des prairies canadiennes, l'auteur entreprend l'examen des relations qui existent entre les classes sociales et les attitudes vis-à-vis la santé mentale. Il n'existe aucune relation significative entre ces deux facteurs lorsqu'on utilise une échelle de « negation » de la santé mentale et deux indicateurs traduisant le refus de l'informateur à reconnaître que l'isolement est un problème. Par ailleurs, il existe des relations significatives entre les classes sociales et les échelles d'isolement physique et sociale. On tente, par après, d'éclairer ces résultats par diverses explications possibles. The relationship between social class and attitudes toward mental illness is examined using interviews with a random sample of the adult population of a typical, small, Canadian prairie town. There were no statistically significant relationships between social class and scores on a scale measuring “denial” of mental illness and two indicators of “insulation” of mental illness. There were, however, significant relationships between social class and scores on scales of physical and social “isolation” and responses to one other interview question. Various explanations for the results are explored.     

Lexicographic state-dependent subjective expected utility

An additive-across-states decomposition of lexicographic linear utility is easily obtained under a mild structural assumption concerning sufficient richness of acts in the domain of preference assessment, but the vectorial nature of lexicographic utility introduces two complexities absent in the real-valued case. First, the concept of state nullity becomes lexicographic rather than binary; and second, a standard construction for obtaining subjective probabilities from real-valued, state-dependent utilities produces matrices instead of nonnegative real numbers in the lexicographic setting.