Problem of Order

Wrong, a professor of sociology at New York University and author of Power: Its Forms, Bases and Uses , offers a scholarly and highly abstract discussion of major theorists of social order. Maintaining that any emphasis on a single solution denies the complexity of human nature, he analyzes political theorists likes Hobbes and Locke, sociologists like Talcott Parsons and Peter Berger and the all-encompassing worldviews of Marx and Freud. After discussing the tensions between individuals and groups, Wrong addresses the relationship between group conflict and social order. Only at the book's end does he apply theory to contemporary fears of growing ethnic and religious disorder or a totalitarian excess of order. Looking at the contemporary loss of faith and the ``end of ideology'' occasioned by the fall of the Soviet Union, Wrong notes that no matter what happens to nation states, the basic units of social order--the family, the Gemeinschaft , the network joined by the common goal--will survive. (Feb.)