Content area
Full Text
The Problem of Order: What Unites and Divides Society, by Dennis Wrong. New York: Free Press, 1994. 354 pp. $24.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-02-935515-X.
DAVID LOCKWOOD University of Essex
It is given to few scholars to coin concepts that enter the vocabulary of their subjects. Dennis Wrong's "oversocialized conception of man" (from here on referred to as "OSCM") long since acquired this status, and his latest book is an extended commentary on the themes raised in the influential article of that name, whose aim was to provide a critique of the normative functionalist view of human nature--above all the Parsonian one--that would complement criticisms directed at this school of thought by "conflict" theorists of the sixties. This, however, did not mean promoting an undersocialized view of human nature, and the present work corrects any such impression by way of a thoroughgoing analysis of how theorists from Hobbes onward have conceived of the psychological and social sources of order and disorder. His idea of sociological theorizing has also remained consistent. It is still concerned, as he wrote in "OSCM," with "questions arising out of problems that are inherent in the very existence of human societies," such as, "How are men capable of uniting to form enduring societies in the first place?" "How is men's animal nature domesticated by society?" These questions cannot be finally answered and "do not lend themselves to successively more precise answers as a result of cumulative empirical research, for they remain eternally problematic" (from Wrong's Skeptical Sociology [London, 1977], pp. 32-33).
In this book, he deals not with cognitive order, based on shared meanings, but with social order ("achievement of consensus, solidarity or cohesion among interacting individuals" [p. 227]) and primarily with the problem of "how individuals are shaped by socialization to become at least minimally...