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Ideology and the Soviet Family: A Review Article1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Robert S. Lynd
Robert S. Lynd*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

A central fact of modern living is the knowledge that in the sphere of social relations and institutions “natural law” does not control and “natural rights” do not exist. Man's culture is what he makes it, and rights are the product of social action. Planned change on a culture-wide scale lies ready to our hand. If the course of institutional change is uneven and, in the main, slow, this is not due to the fact that present institutional forms are either functionally adequate or founded on “higher” laws, or that human beings are “naturally” averse to change.

Actually, human behavior is vastly malleable; but at the same time man also exhibits huge patience in wearing inherited institutional hair shirts.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , December 1950 , pp. 268 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1950

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Footnotes

1

Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia: The Family in the U.S.S.R., Documents and Readings, edited with an introduction by Rudolf Schlesinger (London, 1949) 408 pp.

References

2 Hammond, J. L. and Hammond, Barbara, The Village Labourer: 1760-/R32 (London, 1927), pp. 100–101 Google Scholar.

3 Marx, K. and Engels, F., The German Ideology (New York, 1939), p. 49 Google Scholar.

4 Schlesinger, R., op. cit., pp. 391–92 Google Scholar.

5 See Current Digest of the Soviet Press, December 27, 1949, pp. 5–6.