448
GERTRUD LENZER
"dialectical" method finally takes us to the point where criticism simply
has to stop and give up. And it gradually becomes clear how in tht..
past Lipset seems to have been able to disarm his critics. He has
contrived a kind of non-thinking, so that when one finishes such a work
as
The First New Nation
there is actually almost nothing left to agree
or disagree with. In one way or another he manages constantly to undo
his own ideas and arguments; he qualifies them out of existence, and
by the end of the book most of them are reduced to nothing.
Lipset also has a pronounced tendency to quote
in extenso.
Quotation
is certainly an essential scholarly device, and contributes to the integra–
tion and synthesis of knowledge. But many of the quotations and refer–
ences in this work are used to back up-through mere repetition-ideas
Lipset himself puts forward. This represents innocence of the simplest
procedures of scholarship and argumentation; it confuses agreement with
authority, and fails even to rise to the elementary logic of evidence:
because some other writer shares an opinion with you has nothing to
do with the truth or untruth of the idea; nor does it make that idea any
more of a "fact." In short, Lipset is quite unable to distinguish between the
logical modes of demonstration and assertion-a failing not altogether rare
among social scientists. In a number of instances which I have checked,
Lipset more often than not cites out of context and distorts the original
meaning so radically that his sources appear to be saying something
quite different or even the opposite of what they in fact did say. In one
of the most peculiar instances of this practice, we find Lipset doing it to
his own work. In the chapter, "A Changing American Character?",
which is primarily directed against David Riesman and William H.
Whyte, Lipset writes:
Foreign travelers' accounts of American life, manners, and
character traits constitute a
body of evidence
with which to
test
the thesis that the American character has been transformed
during the past century and a half. Their observations provide
us with a kind of comparative mirror in which we can look at
ourselves over time. It is important to note, therefore, that the
type of behavior Riesman and Whyte regard as
distinctly
modern,
as reflecting the decline of the Protestant Ethic, was
repeatedly reported by many of the nineteenth-century travelers
as a peculiarly American trait in their day. Thus the English
writer Harriet· Martineau at times might be paraphrasing
The
Lonely Crowd
in her description of the American of the 1830's.
. . . (Italics mine)
Here, in
The First New Nation
(Lipset also uses de Toqueville's writings
as "evidence")' Riesman and Whyte are told that they failed to take
