The City is a civilizing influence. This is one of the enduring themes of western thought. The crowding, filth, and exploitation of the industrial city in nineteenth-century Europe could not dampen the enthusiasm of urbanists such as Weber, Ruskin, or Spengler; nor is there any dearth of eulogizers of today‘s sprawling megalopolis. This mode of thought has also found its way into the poor countries of the third world, where the overwhelming majority lives in isolated villages. The current message for them is to seek urbanization if they want to be prosperous. This is the essence of a now familiar proposition that cities are necessary for economic development.

In order to make sense of the endless complexities of social life, social scientists conceptualize the empirical world in terms of interlocking systems and subsystems of roles and behavior, holding some of these spheres constant so that others can be studied and understood. This is a necessary and desirable aspect of social scientific enterprise. It may well be, however, that too many aspects of human interaction are held constant by the conventional ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ distinctions that dominate the study of developing nations. Although we have a growing body of data about the attitudes, values, and behaviors of the individuals who comprise the mass publics of such nations, we have relatively little systematic information about how this micro-level analysis feeds into and affects the processes and actors that are visible at the national level of political life. Most countrycentered macro-studies, in turn, make few, if any, systematic references to variables extending beyond national boundaries into the international environment. Such criticism seems to call for a more extensive analysis across systems—analysis which not only takes into account the attributes of individuals and of national institutions, but which also links these units to one another and to a variety of other sub- and supra-national structures and processes as well.

Even a casual survey of recent history reveals that a society's devotion to democratic or egalitarian principles hardly rules out blatant racial oppression. Indeed, the two positions have often been deemed compatible. The democratic ideology professed by Europeans (or those of European descent settled elsewhere) has been drawn from the egalitarian thought of the Enlightenment. As Louis Hartz has indicated, Enlightenment thought on this matter can be interpreted either inclusively or exclusively—equality can be granted to all men, or only to certain categories of men. The seeming paradox of egalitarian rhetoric combined with obvious inequities is often resolved through defining members of some groups as outsiders—not a part of the ‘Herrenvolk’ or the ‘people’—or even as subhuman.

The need for comparative studies of Jewish communities has occasionally been argued, but apart from largely typological comparisons of Jewish polities, there have been few, if any, attempts at a sociological comparative study of Jewish communities. Nearly all the sociological studies of Judaism have restricted their analysis to the Jewish community in the United States, and it is possible that their findings possess little generality beyond that society.

Stone Age Economics is the most important book in the field of economic anthropology produced by an American cultural anthropologist since M. J. Herskovits published The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples in 1940. Its theoretical and analytical superiority to that earlier book should cheer those of us who feel depressed because of the slow and tortuous course of progress in this sub-field of anthropological inquiry. While Sahlins’ book is original and provocative, however, it is not likely to revolutionize thinking in the field as much as the recent work by Godelier (1967). Even though it lacks the theoretical scope and scholarly judiciousness of the latter work, it should nevertheless become a minor classic in the literature dealing with ‘primitive’ (or tribal) economic life.