ABSTRACT
The spectrum of contemporary political and intellectual life in America is composed of three ideologies: liberalism, radicalism, and conservatism. By the early 1960s as Horowitz's career progressed, we were becoming an increasingly liberal society; and, within an already liberal sociology, functionalism was being further challenged by other approaches less likely to advocate stasis. In both American society and sociology, the liberalizing trend became the norm by the late 1960s and early 1970s, and then actually tipped over into advocacy of radicalism among a large and well-educated portion of American society as well as among many, if not most, sociologists. The New Left reception of Horowitz's biography of Mills necessitates that we confront the fact that the terms "radical", "liberal", and "conservative", which once covered almost the entire political and social spectrum, have now been reduced to two: "liberal" and "conservative".
