For the most part, American sociology has accepted the appealing formula of neutrality with regard to political and ideological values, a formula especially put forward by the functionalist school. It has the golden merit of posing issues in a seemingly natural science manner. The sociologist can adopt the physicist's pose toward his work. We provide society with carefully sifted information, comparative analysis of social structures, and at the upper range, the likely consequences of performing or not performing an action in terms of the given diagnosis. The social scientist using a functionalist philosophy can feel free of responsibility at a decision making level. Whether society decides to employ or ignore the provided data is held to be a matter of indifference, a situation requiring moral wisdom rather than social theory. Without minimizing the sound contributions of the function-Structure approach, particularly in overcoming the provincialism and conceit of the pre-functionalist schools of anthropology, there is a sure moral undercurrent in a method which sees the social scientist as diagnostician and society as a patient. It has the appearance of satisfying the historic identification of social theory to social welfare, and no less an emotional identification with a neutral-objective image culled from physics. Social history becomes a variable in the preparation of trend reports and thereby trivialized into a moment in the functionalist scheme.

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Unilateralism is a big word. Like Moliere's comment on prose, it is something we have been using all of our lives without knowing its exact nature. Perhaps this is because unilateralism is a notion which we have measured in terms of degree rather than kind. The rub seems to be in the word “degree.” Thus, to understand the significance of “unilateral initiatives,” and perhaps to appreciate the complexities in working out an intelligent strategy for winning international peace, it might be worthwhile to explain the varied aspects that attach to a concept of unilateralism.

Hyland, Lee, and Mills (2015) provide ample evidence regarding the value of mindfulness to individuals and the industrial–organizational community as a whole. However, as they noted, mindfulness programs and practices have not yet found widespread implementation among businesses and other organizations. Hyland et al. suggest two primary reasons for this. First, the move toward a nonjudgmental, presently aware, and accepting mind is a tall order for most individuals in our Western society who are heavily conditioned to be relatively self-interested, judgmental, and future oriented. Second, typical mindfulness programs (e.g., mindfulness based stress reduction; MBSR) may be too costly and time consuming for organizations.

This article examines the present bifurcation of policy-making into domestic and foreign components, and urges a theoretical effort aimed at unifying national policy by integrating its various components. Beyond such an urging, the article aims to show that the act of making policy invariably involves decisions about events that take place both within and outside of a nation. This is not a claim for the superiority of any one segment of policy making. What is important or trivial is determined within a means-ends continuum. In breaking down artificial barriers inherited from nationalist models, it is possible to institutionalize a policy process that takes into account “shrinkage” of the world that is a direct consequence of new information technologies, and at the same time, incorporates the wisdom of classical ethical theories on the nature of power.

Were it not linguistically awkward, I would be inclined to entitle these remarks a discourse on what went wrong with the love affair of policy-makers, academic pundits, and hard-core positivists with the world of science. In the nineteenth century, science was as identified with progress as bacon is with eggs. This optimism has given way to a pandemic mistrust of science by all sorts of elites. Popular displeasure became transparently evident in the waning decades of the twentieth century. Mistrust of science has only deepened in the first years of the new millennium. The ease with which scientific products are converted into destructive weaponry only partially accounts for the new skepticism about conventional claims. Unanticipated negative human consequences of actual discoveries in areas ranging from genetic engineering to wireless communication are at least as important an element in popular concerns. Nonetheless, professional assertions about the benefits of science continue unabated. Peter Watson in his fine recent survey, The Modern Mind, in which he asserts science as such “provides a new kind of humanity and a canon for life as it is now lived,” typifies these claims. The limitation in this by no means unusual formulation is that few people are actually involved in the life of science, while many are affected by applications of scientific work that often have indeterminate or, even worse, destructive consequences.

This essay explores several facets of current debates about globalization: especially the role of American national culture in defining the issue of international outreach; and the examination of specific dimensions of globalism—standardization of technology, rationalization of the international monetary system, evaluation and measurement of performance. Once issues are examined in empirical rather than ideological terms, it is clear that advantages accrue to those societies capable of product innovation and satisfaction of mass needs, rather than those that resort to threat, force or coercion. The age of globalization, far from being an extension of the colonial and imperial systems that dominated most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, signifies closure to the old political economy. The essay ends with a coda on globalization as the latest stage of an egalitarianism that places the modernization-developmental process at loggerheads with most varieties of totalitarian rule.

I would like to examine two aspects of German scholarly emigration to the Western democracies, especially the United States and Great Britain. I do not necessarily seek to offer a full explanation of this complex historical and ideological issue, but rather an analysis that attempts to avoid the maze of sociological generalizing that has grown up around the politically inspired migration of scholars.

Let me state quite frankly that I am neither a devotee of the history of ideas approach nor an apologist for any particular group of exiles or their ideology. Rather, I seek to understand the common denominators, or better, the root elements that recently led René König (1984) to locate the source of the German sociological exodus in the virulent nationalism of the 1920s, and to argue that the fusion of conservative and radical elements in post-1933 rational socialism was a culmination rather than a cause of social scientific breakdown. As Otto Neurath put this plight: “We are like sailors who must rebuild their ships on the open sea without benefit of a dock, or an opportunity to select the best replacement parts” (Blum, 1985).

The title of my essay, invoking, as it does, the justifiably famous Japanese cinema verité production of Rashomon, might well strike a discordant note. My aim, however, is to clarify, not to confuse. The film describes a variety of eyewitnesses to a murder, each one of whom, infused with different motives, “saw” the event differently from the other eyewitnesses. This is little more than a modern-day version of Walter Lippmann's observations on the ideological, interest-laden nature of the formation of public opinion in modern society, but it serves us well in introducing the topic of this essay.

What I am suggesting with respect to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and what I hope to demonstrate, is that we are now experiencing a similar paradox in the sociology of knowledge.

Since Fidel Castro came to power nearly a quarter-century ago, diplomats from Latin America, politicians from North America, and academics from both hemispheres have been asking how to involve Cuba in the Caribbean peacemaking process. More often than may be warranted by evidence, they have assumed that Cuban interests are consonant with those of the other states of the Caribbean region. Any objection to the word interests as being too strong is met by a barrage of rhetorical arguments purporting to demonstrate that, at the very least, a modus vivendi is possible. But Cuban communism is a sore thumb and not easily disposed of by appeals to use the opposite hand.

Once upon a time, earlier in the twentieth century, individualism was a doctrine that could be readily dismissed as archaic, idiosyncratic, and simply out of phase with the modern fashion. Even those who wanted to make a place for the individual were compelled to speak apologetically about the “new individualism” as a kind of hybrid of social welfare economy in contradistinction to the old individualism. Henry Steele Commager reminded us in 1950 that “the phenomenon of socialization was a logical expression of the American temperament in the new century. It reflected that decline of the importance of individualism and that growing awareness of social responsibility that could be noted similarly in law, education, business, and legislation.“