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In the 1960s, the New Left sought to transform American society by mobilizing the most oppressed and excluded groups—blacks, the poor, unemployed youths. This article explores both the causes and consequences of the powerful attraction that the American New Left felt for the oppressed and downtrodden. The political thought and actions of the New Left cannot be reduced to psychological motives but must instead be rooted in the New Left's commitment to radical egalitarian social relations and values. While there is much that can be admired in the New Left's deep and sincere concern for the disadvantaged, the New Left's romance with the oppressed also had darker, illiberal consequences that led many in the New Left to excuse and justify the very sort of oppression they had originally sought to oppose.

Jeffrey Friedman (see SA 41:1/93Z5036) made several charges critical of cultural theory (CT). Although some of the criticism stem from a misreading of CT, others raise vitally important questions about social theory generally. In a reply to Friedman, a defense is offered of the categorization of cultures used in CT, & of the enterprise of constructing general social theories that seek to discern transhistorical patterns. Individualism & egalitarianism are argued to be inseparable; culture is held not to be autonomous; CT does not ignore history; its categories are universal; it can account for preference determination; but it is not amoral & does not absolve the individual of responsibility for making choices. In Cultural Theory as Individualistic Ideology: Rejoinder to Ellis, Friedman asks how one can examine the sources of people's beliefs, tastes, & preferences without falling into "self-refuting determinism." CT's attempt to do so posits five anthropologically derived competing ways of life that are intended to apply to all forms of culture &, therefore, to provide a universal framework for explaining people's preferential biases. Ellis's defense does not adequately address the concerns expressed in the critique. CT's reductionism stems from its neglect of historically contingent cultural traditions that thwart a priori attempts to predict culture. This ahistoricism transforms a myopic view of US politics as a battle of egalitarianism against individualism into a timeless truth, providing ideological self-affirmation for individualists, but diminishing the prospects for being able to explain or criticize individualism -- or any other political preference. Adapted from the source document.

This article distinguishes between a competitive individualist process-oriented vision of equality and an egalitarian results-oriented vision of equality, and examines the changing relationship between these visions of equality in the American past. What is "exceptional" about the United States is not, as is often claimed, that it lacked a tradition of equal results but that those who favored equalizing results believed that equal process was a sufficient condition for realizing equal results. This study contends that these rival visions of equality, once believed to be mutually supportive, have become increasingly divorced in 20th century America.

Charisma is commonly regarded as disruptive and unpredictable. Its origins are treated as mysterious and unexplainable. This view of charisma is due in part to a tendency to reify charisma, but more importantly to the lack of an adequate theory of social organization. After clearing up some methodological confusions surrounding the concept of charisma, I present a theory that predicts the type of organization, and the type of organizational situation, in which charismatic leadership will occur. By joining Mary Douglas's grid-group analysis with Herbert Simon's decision theory, I show that charismatic leadership, far from being a disruptive force, serves an integrative function in egalitarian organizations hampered by disagreement on facts and values.

"Hegemony" has become a fashionable catchword in a number of intellectual circles. One encounters it among historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, even (or, perhaps, especially) literary critics. Many a frustrated radical finds it a useful explanation for the quiescence of the masses. Marxist scholars frequently see it as a liberating departure from Marx's economic reductionism. More mainstream social scientists often detect little harm in it, since the notion that people are not ruled by force alone, but also by ideas, seems highly congruent with what they have learned from Max Weber and Talcott Parsons.