504
PARTISAN REVIEW
analysis.
A second segment of the issue is devoted to "Featured
Reviews,"which cannot be distinguished from "Reviews" either in length
or quality. Here we have a potpourri of books, this time mainly on the
sociology of religion . The first review applauds
The Chllrching oj America
for "its tightly reasoned theory of 'religion economics'," which states
bluntly that "we must view denominations as firms , churchgoers as cus–
tomers, and religion itself as a commodity that sells only when vigorously
marketed by dedicated, innovative and highly accessible preachers." Is it
any wonder that present relationships between religious figures and soci–
ologists of religion are less than cordial?
Next is a book that takes religion seriously on its own and on his–
torical grounds,
The Glory and the Power: The Fundamentalist Chaliel1ge
(0
the Modern World
by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby. The re–
viewer, Mark Juergensmeyer, asserts that "this book's efforts at explaining
these phenomena reinforce the stereotypical Western view of what these
movements represent and illustrate the inadequacy of concepts derived
from contemporary American experience for doing comparative social
analysis." The alternative, needless to say, is a vision based on "the small
group of religious activists" falsely labeled as fundamentalists. Once again,
a book that promotes a Western vision or a modernist view is seen as
hopelessly out of step with sociology. Curiously, sociology is never as–
sumed to be out of step with the world as described by others.
Martin Riesenbrodt's knowledgeable and careful review of Ernest
Gellner's book
Fundam enta lism, R eason, and Religion
provides some
contrast. Here the options among fundamentalism , relativism, and
rationalism are taken seriously, and antagonism is something to be
overcome rather than celebrated. Indeed, the remaining briefer notices in
this segment on the sociology of religion fare better than the long stuff.
The reviews by Benton Johnson, R. Stephen Warner, Patricia Wittberg,
Andrew Greeley, Jerome Himmelstein , Samuel Klausner, Fred Kniss, and
George M. Thomas are fair-minded.
We finally come to the body of the issue - the "reviews" themselves.
I am struck by the first implications of the major category, "Social
Hierarchies." Not long ago, sociology had a concept called "social
stratification." But that organizing category seems to have perished in a
miasma of political correctness. The shift to a notion of hierarchies is an
open invitation to presume not just status differentiation but status in–
equalities. In fact, every review in this segment presupposes a theory of
exploitation underlying the presumption of an hierarchical framework.
Social differentiation is assumed to be uniformly the same as class, race,
