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Early in the re-education of the German people the military government attempted to develop a sense of collective responsibility for results of National Socialism, especially for atrocities in concentration camps. Detailed interviews indicate that, before the Allied occupation, Germans were aware of the existence and function of concentration camps, although they did not know the details or extent. Almost universally, the individual German projects responsibility upon the Nazi party or the S.S. There is little evidence that exposure to the facts was developing a sense of need for greater personal participation in political life among the traditionally unpolitical.

Cet article s’interroge sur les raisons de la forte cohesion de l’armee allemande tout au long de la Deuxieme Guerre mondiale. Informes notamment par l’interrogatoire de prisonniers de guerre et d’intensifs entretiens psychologiques, les auteurs degagent et explicitent la notion de « fonction du groupe elementaire » pour comprendre la resistance du soldat allemand. C’est la satisfaction des principaux besoins elementaires (subsistances et soins, affection et estime des camarades et des superieurs, etc.) qui assure la cohesion de l’unite de combat. Celle-ci se trouve renforcee par l’existence d’un « noyau dur » et la communaute d’experience. La desagregation du groupe elementaire croit avec l’egocentrisme : isolement du soldat, souci anxiogene de sa famille, instinct de conservation. L’article etudie aussi le role du sentiment de l’honneur militaire, et les relations d’autorite entre le soldat, ses sous-officiers et officiers. Il examine enfin l’efficacite de symboles secondaires (ethique patriotique, idees politiques, devotion a Hitler) dans la construction de cette cohesion, ainsi que le processus de leur desagregation.

Sociology faces troubling developments as it enters its second century in the United States. A loss of theoretical coherence and a sense of disciplinary fragmentation, a decline in the quality of its recruits, the cooptation of its clients, a muted public voice, and sinking prestige in governmental circles these are only a few of the trends signalling a need for renewed debate about how sociology is organized. In this volume, some of the most authoritative voices in the field confront these conditions, offering a variety of perspectives as they challenge sociologists to self-examination."

The introduction of an all-volunteer military in the United States has raised a number of basic questions. Is the new manpower system producing an effective military force, especially in the combat arms? What is the political and moral basis of a system that relies heavily on members of deprived minorities to be the combat soldiers? This paper reviews the efforts to develop as an alternative a voluntary national service with both military and civilian options.

In a period of search for politico-military détente between the major nuclear powers, one cannot avoid the question of whether the theories and categories for the analysis of international relations, especially those involving the role of military force, are appropriate and clarifying. Although they strive to make use of timeless categories, social scientists, especially when analyzing international relations, must take into consideration the changing historical context. In this paper I will attempt to reassess the well-known issue of the limits of military intervention in international relations by advanced industrial societies. I will seek to extend and formulate the ideas which, in The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait, were vaguely expressed in the notion of a constabulary.

The shift from a system of conscription to an all-volunteer military is a manifestation of the long-term decline in the mass armed force in Western parliamentary system. The end of conscription is no short-term measure but likely to persist so that the emergence of an expanded all-volunteer armed forces raises a series of sociopolitical issues for a political democracy. First, the hypothesis is examined that the military in the United States is displaying an increased emphasis on its organization boundaries and distinctive values. Thereby, its linkages with civilian society become attenuated and tied to special segments of the social structure. Second, it is possible to examine the changing social recruitment and, thereby, probe the hypothesis that the military—both the officer corps and the enlisted personnel—each in its own fashion is becoming less and less socially representative. These trends in social recruitment, especially of army officers, can create an “ideological cast” in the military and serve as another source of political cleavage. The implication is drawn that “institution building” is required in order to insure civilian control and to articulate the military with the larger society.

In the origins of sociology, "social control" served as a central concept both for relating sociology to social philosophy and for analyzing total societies. In its classical sense, it referred to the capacity of a social group to regulate itself. The concept supplied a basis for integration of theory and research until the 1930s. While the traditional usage of social control has persisted, the term has been redefined to mean either socialization or social repression. Either the classical meaning must be utilized or a new term must be developed to refer to the capacity of social groups to effect self-regulation if theory and research are to deal with macrosociology under advanced industrialism.

With the termination of the Selective Service System in 1973, the armed forces will be reduced in size, but for the first time the United States will have an expanded military operating as a "force in being" rather than a cadre for mobilization. Several fundamental public policy questions are involved: will the armed forces be able to recruit the necessary number and quality personnel; will this force be relatively representative of the larger society. With present reduction in force levels, recruitment is made more difficult because of lack of career stability and declining opportunities. The end of the draft has already resulted in shortages of skilled and technical personnel as well as declining enrollment in Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) and National Guard and reserve units. Together with age restrictions and educational guide lines, this suggests that progress toward numerical quotas is in part a compromise in quality. A review of the characteristics of the manpower pool indicates that it is weighted toward the low-income and modest social status group. The social demography of the armed forces is not predetermined, but it will play an important role in the internal viability of the armed forces in civil-military relations in the post-Vietnam period.

attempt to encompass forms as diverse as family, community, ethnic, and class conflict (1, 3, 10). Clearly, the understanding of war would be a crucial test of any general theory of social conflict.1 Despite aspirations for generalized explanations of social con? flicts, social scientists cannot overlook the highly distinctive aspects of war as a proc? ess of social change. First, as of the second half of the twentieth century, wars are "unique" forms of social conflicts because they are waged only by nation-states. War implies social conflict between nation-states with their ideologies for legitimizing the use of violence in the national interest. The nation-state is a terri

The professional armed forces of Western European nation-states developed out of feudal forms through a process of “institutional differentiation”. By “institutional differentiation” is meant the bureaucratic transformation by which the armed forces emerged as a distinct organization fashioned by its own system of recruitment and training, by the accumulation of significant amounts of its own resources, and operating in terms of its specialized format and calculus.

Biographical analysis has been a traditional device by which historians and social scientists have sought to relate changes in social structure to political developments. All too often, the richness of personal detail has been hung on a “great man” theory of history, without regard to the key leadership groups involved.

The following article compares some major aspects of two studies made of the behavior of voters in presidential elections. The comparison was made in order to determine whether or not some of the conclusions drawn from one of the studies, the 1940 Erie County, Ohio, study, could be verified in the second study, a 1948 Survey Research Center national study of the election. Such comparisons of similar studies are essential to the progress of social research in that they guard against unwitting selection or exclusion of crucial variables in the studies. Two of the more common sources of such inadvertent selection or exclusion of variables are found in 1) the choice of unique groups of people to study and 2) the carrying out of studies under unique conditions. For example, the repeated demonstration that racial prejudice among college sophomores may be eliminated or reduced by "education" has too frequently led to the narrow observation that education is the solution for the problem on a national scale. Such a conclusion makes at least two major assumptions, namely 1) that college sopho. mores are representative of all American people so that what is true for this unique segment of the total population is also true for the remainder of the population, and, perhaps more importantly, 2) that the classroom situation in which education "succeeds" does not differ in any essentials from "more normal" social situations. The extent to which one can generalize from conclusions drawn from classroom studies of college undergraduates must, of course, be probed by studies of other segments of the population in other than classroom situations. In this and other areas of social research, failure to repeat studies may result in accidental control or elimination of those variables which differentiate population segments and may thereby obscure important parts of the total picture or even lead to completely erroneous conclusions. Tn this article conclusions drawn from the study of voting be'The authors wish to thank Professor Paul F. Lazarsfeld and their colleagues at the Survey Research Center, University of Michigan, for many helpful criticisms during the preparation of this paper. [710]

Sociology has developed as an academic profession since its origin. This paper seeks to analyze the efforts of sociologists to create a practice specialty and to identify the intellectual, organizational, and professional barriers to an "applied sociology." Alternatively, the role of the sociologist as a "staff" professional is examined.