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There is a happy irony in the fact that an essay on aggression—whether political or otherwise, violent or otherwise, and whether physical or verbal—should elicit comments that are in these ways not at all aggressive. In this rather scientific polylogue, you as reader and I as author are thus spared the need and even the temptation to respond with defensive verbal aggression.

It is argued that PO surveys, in order to contribute to the understanding of the causes of instability & civil conflict, including revolution, must probe ever deeper into the causes of individual actions & beliefs. They need new & deeper hyp's to do the res required in unstable times. One potentially fruitful area in this regard is the study of value consensus & dissensus. A 52-page interview schedule was prepared to ascertain the pol'al values on which various categories of people agree & disagree, & the possible is of responses on the value items. One of the major hyp'ed discriminators was SES: poor people should have cliff values from rich people. A total/sum of 121 usable interviews were taken in the US & a total/sum of 153 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. R's of middle & physically deprived SES were eliminated, producing a final sample of 85 cases in the US, of which 42 were of low & 43 of high SES, & 116 cases in Brazil, of which 68 were of low & 48 of high SES. Data obtained indicate that the poor & rich R's do not differ as to their conception of equal justice for poor & rich. Both poor & rich in both countries were more likely to say murder is mitigated by poverty than not, but Brazilians are more likely to say this than US R's. Ratio's of disapproval of stealing food by a poor & hungry person were 3 to 2 among poor Amer's; 4 to 1 among rich Amer's; 5 to 2 among poor Brazilians; & 6 to 5 among rich Brazilians. Re equality, 56% of poor Brazilians, & 79% of poor Amer's considered themselves equal to anybody else; 72% of rich Amer's & 79% of rich Brazilians considered themselves as equal. It is concluded that on some matters SES distinguishes diff categories of opinion & on some others it does not. Some of the consensus appears to relate to stability & some does not. The proximity of the survey to the Brazilian coup of 1964 (within half a yr after) may have influenced the results. Data also show that the poor in the US lack the intense hostility to the rich that poor R's in Brazil indicated. Brazilians generally seem to lack the degree of involvement & trust in the pol'al process that showed up in the US interviews. Consensus & dissensus are influenced by complex factors which must be studied in greater detail. 2 Tables. M. Maxfield.