IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ
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in Middle East Studies that proliferate in political science and history -
figures such as William Quandt, Fouad Ajami, Bernard Lewis, and Daniel
Pipes. Mur Zurieck seems more focused on the work of Charles Tilly on
the French
Vel/dee
than on George Homans's classic study of English vil–
lagers. Indeed, even Homans's 1964 address to the American Sociological
Association, "Bringing Men Back In," is contemptuously dismissed as
"amounting to little more than understanding others in terms we
understand ourselves." The statement by Sasha Weitman, despite his
predilections, at least makes clear that what is at stake is a holy war
within sociology as much as a struggle between Israelis and Palestinians.
The balance of the issue bears this out in painful if repetitive detail.
In what is billed as a "featured essay," Robert
L.
Nelson takes on
Richard A. Epstein's book,
Forbidden Grollnds.
Epstein is perhaps the
foremost expert on property and contract law in the United States.
Admittedly, to him, the free market is best left to operate on its own,
except when it demonstrably is incapable of doing so. Nelson describes
Epstein's work variously as "flawed," "unrealistic," "tendentious,"
"distorted," "surmise," "exaggerated," "badly distorted," and Mr.
Epstein himself as a scholar who "seeks to make the existing data fit his
theory." Given Me Nelson's belief that the current litigious condition
of America , while "costly and imperfect," is "worth it," one has
to
ask
just which kettle is calling the pot black. Me Nelson seems to want ev–
erything free, except the market. No private enterprise viewpoint can
pass unscathed.
The follow-up feature essay by Daniel F. Chambliss pits "traditional
bioethics," whose advocates remained unnamed and uncounted, against
"the social science tradition [which] proposes an alternative model for
morality and medicine, one explicitly contradictory to the older philo–
sophical one." The reviewer does make a strong case for various models,
essentially a rejection of the psychologizing tendencies of bioethics. But
it is not at all clear that medical personnel are less inclined to accept the
idea that "decisions are made collectively, not individually," or that
"ethical problems are caused by social structures, not cognitive errors,"
or even that "research should be inductive (empirical) rather than deduc–
tive (logical)." The contributions to bioethics are clear and central. But
it is less evident that this new approach is dismissed by practitioners.
Curiously, the reviewer criticizes the author of one of the three books
under consideration, Charles
L.
Bosk, for his modesty about discovery.
The reviewer chastises him for "an astonishing confession from a gifted
intellectual, and perhaps overwrought" - hardly the sort of psychoanaly–
sis from afar that one would expect from a devotee of social structural
