At a time when sociology has come to be dominated either by convoluted ways of stating the obvious or tortuous and pseudo-mathematical elaborations of dubious methodologies—often, indeed, by excruciating combinations of the two—Peter Berger’s book is to be lauded as an attempted return to sanity.
His basic theme is with developmental approaches to the Third World, not because this is the arena of his major interest but because it offers the best field—and one of the greatest current importance—to analyse the presuppositions underlying the capitalist and socialist rubrics under one or other of which most, if not all, developmental strategies can be subsumed. It thus provides an invaluable and dramatic instance of the interactions between social change and political ethics—the focus of his concern.