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openness of recruitment to higher education is greater in the state
socialist societies than in the Western countri es, the organization of
schooling is more rigidly hierarchi cal and reward oriented there than
in the West. Bow les and Gintis recognize this. The Eastern European
countries " have abolished private ownership of the means of produc–
tion , while replicating the relationships of economic control, domi–
nance, and subordination characteristic of capitalism. " They envisage
a (orm of socialism which is both much more radically egalitarian and
in which power is devolved upon the mass of its population through
participatory democracy. H ere, however, we reach the limits of their
analysis, for thei r characterization of such a society is largely rhetorical.
They speak of the " increased efficiency of socialist economic life,"
which will derive from "comprehensive and rational economic plan–
ning"; and they seem to hold tha t this is readily compatible with
" libera ted education and unalienated work." But it is up to all of us
who hold socialist views to acknowledge that the second of these
accomplishments is only contingently connected to the first, and to seek
to develop a detail ed theoretical analysis that builds upon studies of the
state socialist societies so as to generate a sophisticated understanding
of the specifIcity of capitalism and thereby of the real potentialities of
socialist transformation.
ANTHONY GIDDENS
COLLECTING THE UNCONSCIOUS
STRUCTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Volume
II. By
Claude Levi-Strauss.
Basic Books, Inc. $17.50.
Back in the mid-1930s Claude Levi-Strauss went into the
jungles of central Brazil expecting to encounter human beings much
different from himself. Instead he found similarities. This discovery
had a profound effect on the young professor of sociology at Sao Paulo
University, who had been a classmate of Simone de Beauvoir and
Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne, and he was to spend the following
decades codifying it.
Structural Anthropology, Volume II,
like its predecessor (pub–
lished here in 1963), is made up of articles and addresses spanning a
