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Abstract. This article is the second of two that suggest outlines for a biological {evolutionary) model for analyzing socioeconomic systems. The first article developed concepts applicable to non‐human biological systems.* This article broadens the model to incorporate factors pertinent to human societal systems. First discussed is human volition or purposive choice. Because of this, the particular path of socioeconomic change need not be "accidental" or statistical as with the "natural selection" applicable to non‐human biological systems, but rather may proceed by "volitional selection" from among feasible change paths. Second, the thermodynamic concept of increasing entropy (order to disorder) indicates that economics'"production functions" need be seen more as transformation functions; and thus to overcome accumulating entropic disorder, continuous technological change is necessary. Such technical (man‐thing) changes induce broader societal (man‐man) changes. This is consistent with the evolutionary argument for unidirectional change from the less complex and less stable to the more complex. A third article on the economic theory consistent with the above concepts is planned.

Abstract Theory can be equated with analogy. Both attempt to convey the unfamiliar and/or the complex through use of more familiar and/or simple constructs. The theoretical analogies of "modern" economics have been by and large patterned after a prestigious and powerful Newtonian model, i.e. they have been of the mechanical genre. It has been argued, however, that models of a biological, or evolutionary, nature would be more appropriate to analyzing economic processes and systems. This article is the first of two aimed at suggesting a form for such an evolutionary model. In this article, the analytical concepts of structure and function and their interrelationships are discussed as they apply to non‐human biological systems. Resulting feedback effects which produce dynamic change are placed within the context of the evolutionary model of stratified stability. This model explains developmental change as always tending toward more complex but more stable levels of structure, and thus unidirectional. However, the process of societal change is non‐teleological in that the particular path of change is not deterministic.

A review & critique of AMERICA AS A CIVILIZATION (See SA 5664). Lerner's middlebrowism in the 1950's is what his radicalism was in the 1930's-the unexamined (& almost unrecognized) habitat of his mind where he makes some of the archetypal errors of conventional thought. Thus, one of the blind spots of his book is that, though it speaks of the highbrow lowbrow, it says next to nothing about the middlebrow. This is astonishing in a book.which purports to comment on the cultural scene at the present time when middlebrowism complacently rules our intellectual life. The question to test Lerner's analytic prowess would be, why, despite the energies of mobility, so conformist, so smug, & so rich in power over opinion? Criticism is meaningless if it cannot detect the place of cultural power in the life of intelligence. But, instead of confronting the reigning middlebrowism, Lerner is content, on the one hand, to warn us about certain potential shortcomings in popular culture, & on the other, to snipe away at the `intellectuals' (See also SA 7332). J. A. Fishman.

A characterization of the American proletarian novel of the 1930's, based upon W. B. Rideout's The Radical Novel in in the United States, 1900-1954. Some of the works of I. K. Friedman, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Robert Cantwell & others are reviewed in tracing & contrasting the emphases of the Socialist & the proletarian novel. In the latter the Mc has ceased to present itself as the intelligent guide to a better society, the faith in parliamentary change is gone, & a coming struggle for power is predicted. The strike & the conversion to the proletarian cause are the most common themes of the proletarian novel, as they were of the earlier Socialist novel. In most cases the novels end in violence & defeat for the workers, whereas actually labor scored one success after the other in the depression yrs. Such as it was, the proletarian novel flourished in the first half of the depression decade & dwindled away during the later Popular Front days. The most intelligent proletarian novelists did not entirely believe that America had a proletariat - a uniform Lc with a collective will & the capacity for concerted action. Rideout defines as `radical' any novel that advocates that the system be fundamentally changed. This leads him into an arbitrariness of choice which forces him to accept, on his own grounds, pretty much the Communist dogmas on what is radical & what is not. J. A. Fishman.

American cultural life depends on a discontinuity between conservative feeling & liberal thinking. The source of the conservative impulse, as shown by our literature, is that nostalgia for the simpler, happier way of life which we have from the beginning felt to be receding into oblivion. We value with our conservative instincts that which history has already rendered irrelevant to the formation of our ideas. The works of Whitman, Melville, Edith Wharton, H. Adams, H. James, Wallace Stevens, the regionalists, & others are discussed in terms of this contradiction. The fundamental purpose of conservatism must always be to remove or reconcile contradictions & polarities, for such oppositions are the perennial source of unrest & change. Programmatic conservatism in America looks to literature for a reconciliation of impulse & idea; since literature could hardly exist without an interpenetration of the one by the other. In much of the most characteristic American writing, impulse & idea are forced apart into a radical opposition. In preserving a vivid distinction between conservative impulse & radical idea American writers - Melville, Hawthorne, & Faulkner no less than Emerson & Whitman - disqualify themselves as conservatives. In the essentials of their art they both mirror & reassert a secular, skeptical, democratic world. J. A. Fishman.

Amts' general subject is the insurgent LMc in the new conditions that have been made for it by England's quasi-socialist 'middleway': the opportunity for status & 'respectability'. Comedy & soc analysis become the weapons of a newly rising class which is gradually displacing an older privileged group & rejecting many of its values in the act of achieving its respectability & power. This point is illustrated via references to Amis' novel That Uncertain Feeling. Through Amis the English continue to perform the unlikely historical feat of making a great middlebrow literature. US conditions have so far been such as to make a great highbrow culture possible, & also a great lowbrow culture but not a great culture of the middle. By contrast the English have for cent's been successfully performing the characteristic middlebrow task of bringing the higher formalities & abstractions of art into a new relation with ordinary experience, with the personal, the temperamental, & the domestic. The middleway in US cultural life is weakened not only by its lack of ideas but by its historic inability to emulate the kind of energetic & creative naturalism that distinguishes the English middlebrow. J. A. Fishman.

Abstract. From the economist Adolph Lowe's voluminous‐writings, Allen Oakleyh has selected eight essays which present the gist of Lowe's thought. It unifies his structural analyses and his instrumental analyses into the system Lowe calls "Political Economics." This pre‐orders desired ends or effects and then determines or applies goal‐adequate means to achieve these ends. Lowe's Essays in Political Economics sketches the economic paradigm by which he expands the evolutionary way of thinking from the subject —economic behavior— to the object, the socioeconomic world. He argues that instability is fundamental, basic and inherent in contemporary industrial capitalism as it has evolved physically, technologically and socially and stability can be restored by an approach which reverses the continuum to end‐means. He holds that if the world evolves, and it does, so must the goal‐adequate methods and instrumentalities to deal with it.

Abstract. The economist Adolph Lowe has developed a methodological alternative, designated Political Economics, for the development of economic theory and the application of economic policy. In totality his system—with a methodology he calls instrumental—makes up a unity that can be seen as a logically derived paradigm shift for economics as a scientific discipline. Under it, by a democratic political process, some desired end‐state is first consciously and systematically determined. Then economic means are instrumentally employed to bring about the economic and social behavior necessary to attain and maintain that end‐state. Available knowledge and tools are useful for this model; however, there is no question that the approach raises significant technical, political and philosophical issues. But these are overshadowed by Lowe's paradigmatic vision, and its corollary modular framework of Political Economics.