The Part Played by Gentiles in the Flow of Mass Communications: On the Ethnic Utopia of Personal Influence

Abstract

Personal Influence is not only a landmark study within the sociological literature on networks, influence, and decision making. It is also an allegory of Jewish-ethnic identity in mid-twentieth-century America and a side-ways commentary on modern Jewish involvement in communications. The book participates in a utopian imagination of society in which Jews and Gentiles alike would be centrally involved in the flow of communications. It turns from Gentile-style status toward Jewish-style connectivity as the basis of social power; defends socially grounded conceptions of mental life against Gentile individualism; insists in its notion of the two-step flow on the rabbinic principle that a text without a commentary is meaningless; and performs some amazing intellectual-moral-historical footwork with the most inconspicuous of all its central terms, “people.” In all these things, it can be read as a “Jewish” text in some sense.

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