Fabric of society
- New York Harcourt 1957
- 777p.
Textbooks designed to serve as collective introductions to all of the social sciences are without question one of the least palatable fruits of mass education. I don’t know how many of them appear annually, but gaudy brochures advertising new volumes seem to issue almost continuously from publishers’ offices, usually ending up in the wastebaskets of social science teachers at the better universities. Thus the appearance of Ralph Ross and Ernest van den Haag’s The Fabric of Society, a textbook that is not only not a piece of hackwork but one that is genuinely challenging and original, is an extraordinary event.