In this explosive book, three experienced mentalhospital staff members attack the basic assumptions on which our entire mental-health system is founded

POWER,GREED,AND STUPIDITYIN THE

MENTAL HEALTH RACKET

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The Professionals' Newsletter Sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, educators, anthropologists use BT as a weekly tip sheet to what is happening in behavioral science. News of the latest research, from a computer-assisted information n e t w o r k . . , important develo p m e n t s in Congress, G o v e r n m e n t agencies and The Office of the President f r o m our Washington o f f i c e . . , new trends in grants and fellowship awards - - all with names and addresses from which you can get additional details. Fill out the coupon for your first year with Behavior Today for $25. Send payment now and receive as a free bonus, " M o n e y & How to Get It," a guide to fund resources.

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Kurt P. Tauber is professor o f political science at Williams College. Williamstown, Massachusetts.

A Hard Look at the Revolutionary Hard Line

DEPENDENCE AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT: LATIN A M E R I C A ' S P O L I T I C A L E C O N O M Y by James D. Cockcroft, Andr~ Gunder Frank and Dale L. Johnson. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1972, 448 pages, $2.50

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more than outline some of the dimensions of the problems. But their, and Mandel's, sophisticated summary of recent historical experience and their attempt to place it into a theoretical framework (however fragmentary and inadequate) provide the reader with an extraordinarily lucid and provocative insight into the complexity of the ongoing quest for human emancipation.r-I

Allan Schnaiberg

by WALTER FISHER and JOSEPH MEHR and PHILIP TRUCKENBROD

Behavior

capitalism constitutes the furnace in which must be forged a new socialist man. Further, as the reverses suffered in the Soviet Union show, even after class domination has been broken, the positive task of transforming human nature never ceases. The creative application of historicaldialectical analysis, rooted as it must be in the concrete experiences and practices of our own lives, is a never-ending task which can have no definitive "solution." Neither Bettelheim nor Sweezy could do

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Two groups of U.S. sociologists are interested in problems of economic development: the majority includes those concentrating on the sociology of underdevelopment; and the minority constitutes a more radical group concerned with dependency and imperialism as determinants of Third World development. While the former are unlikely to read this book, since it represents an antithesis to much of their theory and method, the latter are likely to find the book redundant, and reject it too. To some extent, these are problems of the development of U.S. social science in the post-World War II period; but they are compounded by the nature of this work as well. The book has a peculiar mix of characteristics. It has many features of an edited reader, yet the three authors have individually written all the chapters (with the exception of the collective introduction). The chapters represent the idiosyncratic methodological and regional preferences of each of the triumvirate, but there is a common underlying theory to all the essays and empirical analyses: the theory of dependency. This theme is set out forcefully in the collective introduction and in Frank's Chapter 1: (1) there is no natural state of underdevelopment in Latin America; (2)

the imperialistic neocolonial actions of industrial states, particularly the United States, have created a condition of "'structured underdevelopment"; and (3) without such intervention, Latin America would have developed successfully. Part I of the book develops this general theme, giving details only in Cockcroft's chapter on Mexico. In Part II, there is further detail on the workings of the class structures of dependent societies, particularly Venezuela, Chile and Mexico, as evidenced in recent political conflict and change. Part I I 1 turns to a sociology of knowledge perspective on theories of underdevelopment common among social scientists in the United States, and suggests some reorganization of this research. This last section includes a brilliant, devastating critique by Frank of most conventional socioeconomic approaches, as exemplified in the work of the Chicago Committee on Economic Development and Cultural Change (from which Frank parted years ago). This thorough dissection (or more properly, vivisection) a l m o s t justifies this book's existence. And unquestionably, the general theory of dependence and structured underdevelopment is a crucial counterweight to much theory and research about Latin Society

America and the Third World in general. Despite the flashes of brilliance and the central intellectual and political action implications of the theory, this book does not represent any significant increment to our knowledge. At best, it is repetitive and uneven: the chapters range from the careful and tightly reasoned (for example, Chapters 3 and 12), to the rambling and merely polemical (such as Chapters 2 and 4). Furthermore, it smacks of academic opportunism, since half the chapters are reprints of easily accessible articles and parts of monographs, some of them dating back to 1965 (Chapter 6). In the case of Frank's work especially, some of the essays have been reprinted in as many as two of his own earlier anthologies of his work. This repetition and dating of material is especially disheartening, given the stated objective of Part If to present a "particular emphasis on recent events" (p. xiii). So, for example, all the mentions of Chile refer to the pre-Allende period. This may be because the Spanish edition of this book was published in 1970, and virtually no substantive revision has been made for the English-language version two years later. Moreover, since the "analyses" of many chapters are really forms of social commentary, providing a loose ideological framework for recounting events, the dating of much of the material undermines even the editorializing power of these chapters. 1 think that Latin American specialists would find much more meat in the original works of all three authors, from which many of the better chapters have been extracted: Cockcroft on Mexico, Frank on Brazil and Chile, and Johnson on Chile. These excerpts only serve to whet one's appetite. In particular, they create a consciousness that it is what has been left o u t of previous analyses (in particular, international trade and capital flow) that oils the gears of economic development, and that such economic development is not usually coterminous with social development. Furthermore, they force a recognition that much of our social science literature deals with the more visible but epiphenomenal aspects of socioeconomic development. I am not sure that this is a direct result of the social controls in imperialistic societies such as the United States, as some of the chapters in Part Ill would suggest. Rather, this may be a consequence of the

academic division of labor that has left many sociologists without any training in either the political or economic dimensions of a "political economy." These are not necessarily mutually exclusive hypotheses, as Myrdal, Horowitz and others have more tightly argued. The frustration is that the uneven quality and lack of integration in this book don't do sufficient justice to these important ideas. Ironically, the makeup of the book doesn't even do justice to the previous work of the three authors! A more careful editing and interweaving of these materials might have improved the quality substantially. As it now stands, it is an introduction to the dependence theme, but not one of the better introductions currently available. The proliferation of book-length introductions to the neo-Marxist theories of dependency and structured underdevelopment may even be counterproductive. On the one hand, many social scientists will take such a profusion of titles as indicating that there currently exists some balance in the field between the older theories of underdevelopment and such dependency models, thereby classifying both sets as part of the "established" field, and depriving the dependency model of its attraction for younger and more radical professionals by virtue of its true "underdog" status. On the other hand, anyone reading the actual works will find an incredible amount of duplication and repetition, leading to diminishing returns for his efforts and perhaps a rejection of the dependency model. The combination of such effects on potential and actual readers may undercut future serious study of the theory and practice of dependency, which would be a tragedy of the first magnitude. These three passionate advocates of such serious analysis must set an example. Let others put together the introductory readers (if any more are needed). With the shortage of first-rate social scientists actively engaged in such research, it is an abdication of their political and intellectual responsibility for three gifted analysts to engage in the uncreative game of writing their own Festschri[ten. Time enough for this when they are old men, and their thesis has become an integral part of the social science paradigm. [] A llan Schnaiberg is associate professor o f sociology at Northwestern University.

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