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basis for more far-reaching conclusions. Are shopping habits
to
be
considered? A signpost to a learned paper (not the author's) on '\Con–
tributions to the Theory of Reference-Group Behavior" will refresh
the mind, followed perhaps by a dip into "The Career of the Funeral
Director" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1954). Is the
theme under discussion connected with the career plans of Harvard
students? A glance at "The Validation of Expressed Interests As Com–
pared with Inventory Interests"
(Journal of Applied Psychology,
XXXIX, 1955, 184-89) will supply the desired information. Or is
the researcher anxious to discover why some people prefer to live in
one place rather than another? He will be directed to "Amenities as a
Factor in Regional Growth"
(Geographic Review,
XLIV, 1954, 119).
The wealth and precision of these footnote references is such that
practically every generalization may be said to carry its burden of proof.
"Three Centuries of Women's Dress Fashions: A Quantitative Analysis,"
by Jane Richardson and
A.
L . Kroeber
(Anthropological Record,
V,
1940, 112-50) is merely one out of literally hundreds of such casual
allusions to source material.
To the envious reviewer, gently stewing in what Zelda Fitzgerald
once called "the boiling oil of sour grapes" (this quotation is not from
Riesman, I discovered it elsewhere), such a profusion of learning in–
evitably acts as a challenge. Thirty collected essays, six hundred pages
of rigorously scientific, yet colloquially presented, information on very
nearly every subject under the sun-who can blame the poor critic
if he starts looking for flaws? Alas, wherever he turns he is met with
the same firm, yet gentle and persuasive guidance to the ultimate au–
thority: that of the fact. Whether the subject is international relations,
social tensions, suburban life, or the motor car (there is an extremely
learned discussion of Detroit's production and styling problems), the
reader is discreetly steered through the maze of controversy
to
con–
clusions imposed by dispassionate reasoning and backed by mastery of
the relevant literature. The conclusions may be unexciting, but they
are never hasty ; the mode of reasoning may derive from too uncritical
an acceptance of the current empiricist orthodoxy, but all possible
counter-arguments are considered in advance; the whole may give the
impression of a tremendous accumulation of data devoted to the end
of buttressing an evanescent faith in the mores of an enlightened
middle class: but
this
criticism (like every other, from whatever point
of the compass) is anticipated by the author and built into the struc–
ture of his argument. Marx, Freud, Weber, Veblen, the critics of
"alienation," even the anarchists--they all get their due, and are duly