As an organic creation "Discoveries..." continues to evolve. Our interest here in incisive commentary on noteworthy pieces is repeatedly defined and redefined through the contributions of the Theory and Society community. The following selections display something of that diversity which characterizes our editors and friends as they address long-standing issues and take us in new directions. In "Arguments for a Marxist Use of Wittgenstein" Helga Nowotny reports on a piece by Ferrucio Rossi-Landi likely not accessible to many of our readers; in so doing she realizes the unarticulated hopes that this feature might become a vital resource as well as a suggestive guide. Similarly, Kai Hong's interest in philosophy and language takes us along paths familiar and new in his comments on a book by Noam Chomsky and a recent translation of Jacques Derrida's De la Grammatologie. Roberta Arnold explores a somewhat different set of concerns in her appreciative yet critical look at Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology. Finally, two diverse discoveries -Nils Disco on Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia and Alvin Gouldner on Karabel and Halsey's Power and Ideology in Education begin this issue's trenchant tour. Again these items intimate the range of our community -an expanse and depth which we look forward to exploring, with your help, for some time to come. From Cornelis DISCO Daniel Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia, Cornell University Press, 1975.
Though it starts out with a bang, this book, sad to say, ends in a whimper. Even in defeat, however, it offers more vigorous insights into the process of radical recruitment in the first "third world" country to achieve a Marxist revolution than any other book I have seen. Brower has synthesized many of the historical accounts of Russian populism with his own research in the Soviet state archives, particularly the records of the Tsarist "third section" in St. Petersburg. In so doing he has come up with a very important product: namely, the statistical parameters within which a theory of recruitment to radical populist politics ought to be formulated. While obviously of immediate relevance for anyone studying the Russian populist movement of 1840-1875, the type of relationship that Brower sketches between official education and what he calls the "school of dissent" is of much wider concern to students of revolution and the intelligentsia generally.