Editor's Note: What,Exactly, Is the Purpose of a Book Review?

Qualitative Sociology -     

Picking the Winners: Politician vs. Voter Predictions of Two Controversial Ballot Measures

Abstract Both politicians and voters were asked to predict outcomesof two Oregon ballot measures in 1982. As expected, politicians'predictions always were closer to the mark than voters' were.Further, voters showed stronger signs of wishful thinking (the"Looking-Glass effect") in their predictions than did politicians.Using published preelection polls apparently improved politicians'accuracy in 1982, as well as voters' accuracy in a separate1984 survey. No other sources of data improved predictive accuracy.Findings have implications for theories of representative governmentand are consistent with a new theory of public opinion.     

Issues in the Study of Deviance*

Several issues in the study of deviance are discussed: the definition of deviance; the significance of the deviant act; cultural relativism; the influence of social structures and causation. By using departures from rules to define deviance, sociologists may repeat fallacies of formalistic jurisprudence. Deviance is best left undefined, and preferably delimited ontologically in terms of middle range theory. Spector and Kitsuse's revisionist theory is judged insufficient for macro-analysis of deviance because they fail to reconcile the influence of objective and subjective factors. Cottrell's choice and feedback model is advocated as a means to study the dynamic process wherein values are aggregated in the social definition of deviance. The problem of bringing objective factors into this analysis is solved by showing how changing costs alter the order in which values are satisfied and thus change the overt pattern of societal reaction.     

Literary politics and the Champ of French sociology

Conclusion Certainly it cannot be claimed that French sociology has definitive answers to the problems besetting sociologies everywhere. What can be claimed is that among those sociologies outside the strict and direct domination of American sociology, France's is one of the most interesting. Having avoided the Scylla of mimicking American empiricism and the Charybdis of philosophical devolution, French sociology stands as a small but coherent body of research, the quality of which is frequently very high. Stylistically, its example of theoretical inventiveness and scope is well worth our while. Substantively, its consideration of such topics as inequality, critique, practice, structural analysis, social change, control, and the State, among others, deserves international attention. Those sociologies, such as the American, which have just lately discovered the full significance of certain of these topics would do well to heed the example of the French who, by virtue of intellectual heritage and political-economic curcumstance, have long seen them as central. If the French do not give answers, they do give questions and, more than this, they offer the witness of their situation-bound solutions. The only positive thing I can, for the moment, think to say of the spread of international capitalism is that it has at least made national circumstances less determinant. As the present fiscal crisis deepens and as the control of national ruling classes gives way to the hegemony of international money interests, whatever differences separate others from the French will become even less important: hence, a reason to transcend sociological provincialism.     

Thinking the Unthinkable/Global Realities: Eleven Theses on Marx’s Eleventh Thesis*

Marx’s Eleventh Thesis has long been code for the social theorist’s duty ultimately to do more than think to world. Global realities early in the twenty‐first century have rendered the Eleventh Thesis feeble if not futile. There is no singular ”world“ (not a trivial fact). Social thought must encounter a series of Unthinkables that Marx himself understood to a degree but, in the Eleventh Thesis, as in all of his general and specific politic advice, believed were not definitive barriers to what amounted to liberal politics that history has proven will always be thwarted by the resisted of regressive forces.     

The canonical limits of Durkheim's first classic

A classic text is not always canonized. Canonical texts are frequently anything but classics. Durkheim's Division of Labor in Societyis an instance of the former; his Rules of Sociological Methodof the latter. Both books are based on errors of fact and method. Division of Laborwas so intentionally the classical theory of modern divided societies that Durkheim, son of generations of rabbis, totally misrepresented the facts of Ancient Israel. In Rules,Durkheim was so intent on writing the canonical text of sociology's methods that he stipulated rules that even he (in Suicide) could not use. Durkheim was thus a giant of the sociological past because,not in spite of, his errors. He erred because he dared to think seriously about the moral issues of his time. Hence, the ironic fate of Durkheim's sociology—it led in two different directions. From Rulesand Suicidecame modern empirical sociology. From Elementary Formscame all the antimodernists—beginning with Levi-Strauss, and from him, Derrida and the others—who became, among other things, the most articulate critics of the sociology Durkheim helped invent. Such is the genius of classic, if not canonical, authors like Durkheim.