2 of 5

—William A. Dyrness

By Kathryn Stoner-Weiss
Princeton University Press
240 pp., $35

When are local heroes not persons? When they are in the hands of a social scientist. Then they are … something else—forces maybe, abstractions. This book seeks to discover how post-Soviet Russia is faring by looking at some of the regions, and the premise that "Moscow isn't Russia" is sound. Yet the only persons who get more than the skimpiest passing mention are Moscow players Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, plus favored Western scholars.

The regions studied are four oblasts, or provinces, out of 89 territorial units, one of them twice the size of Texas. So the heroes are not very local, either. To be exact, the local heroes are "high-performance governments" of sizable territories. In case you're interested, Nizhni Novgorod is doing better than Tyumen, which is doing better than Yaroslavl and Saratov. The desiderata are democracy in politics and the free market in economics, a combination only recently established among Western scholars as unassailable.

Adhering strictly to the Gospel of Statistics, the author ladles out charts and graphs to show that early progress comes fast when businessmen and politicians are in cahoots. Or, as she prefers, the "central argument of this book" is that "civil society in the post-Soviet context is poorly organized and that coterminous political and economic change made economic actors particularly important to the functioning of regional governments."

It's what comes next that will please those who exercise the hermeneutics of suspicion on social-science "literature." Positivist methodology's one very small step for mankind leaves us with the puzzle of why "clearly some regions were better governed than others, although on paper their institutions were identical." And so the operative word of the book's final movement is may. Stoner-Weiss comes to the "potentially unsettling prediction" that over the long haul decentralization may be better than the company-town model. That would clear the way, of course, for true heroes truly local.

—Edward E. Ericson, Jr.

By Freeman Dyson
Oxford Univ. Press
124 pp.; $22

Freeman Dyson hopes that technology—which he broadly describes as the fruit of applied science—can become an agent of positive social change. He knows that the events of this century have amply demonstrated the ability of technology to achieve the opposite result when misused, but his hope lies in the fact that the same human beings who misused technology in the past can now use it for more noble ends.

Dyson has the good sense to know that technological advances will inevitably have an impact on society, for good or ill. In The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet, Dyson offers one view of how the technological tools presently available can be used to create a better world. The title of his book reflects his belief that solar power, genetic engineering, and the Internet offer the latest and best hope to create a world where the lives of all people will be dramatically improved.

next page... |  2 of 5

share this page