ABSTRACT
William Buxton's book, Talcott Parsons and the Capitalist Nation-State, is a curious throw-back, for it reveals the intellectual climate of 1966 far more than that of 1986. The critiques of American sociology and political science hearken to discussions and positions established in the wake of the Vietnam involvement. The author's thesis, stated repeatedly and with but slight variations throughout, is that the validation of political sociology is inherently related to the ability of the capitalist nation-state to solve its problems of instrumentation and legitimation. Buxton views his own work as an inventory of such oppressive doctrines and a "radical inversion" of the prescriptive heuristic. The point of social science, so often missed by bone-rattling critics, is that in its commitments to rationality, research results come upon the hard rock of the ideological sources of totalitarianisms. In dealing with American society, it is not capitalism but democracy that is seen as central.
