Return to Sanity?
P.V. Pillai
PYRMIDS OF SACRIFICE: POLITICAL ETHICS AND SOCIAL CHANGE by Peter L. Berger Allen Lane, 1976, 150 pp., 70.00
October 1976, volume 1, No 4

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.

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