Synopses & Reviews
Podgorecki examines oppression that results from pressures inside social groupings, large and small, effected by different normative and conformity-inducing mechanisms designed to regulate human behavior. Podgorecki provides a critical examination of the empirical findings in the most important and imaginative experimental studies of various types of oppression (including those by Milgram and Zimbardo), as well as data collected in natural settings like asylums or concentration camps. New interpretations of those findings furnish a new angle of vision requiring modification of the existing typologies of individual adaptation including the best known typology elaborated by Merton (conformity, ritualism, innovation, withdrawal, rebellion). Podgorecki goes on to trace regularities in historically recorded patterns of behavior of people living under totalitarian and post-totalitarian conditions. Finally, based on these insights and on the recent developments in sociology of law, a new theory of law is advanced, which utilizes as its important axis a conceptual differentiation between the official and intuitive law. Recommended for scholars of sociology, social psychology, political science, and especially criminology.
Review
...well argued and convincing in the conclusions drawn...International Criminal Justice Review
Synopsis
Podgorecki provides a complex analysis of oppression in which he focuses on the legal, psychological and social conditions which contribute to and explain oppression.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Oppression from Within
Behavior under Oppression
Totalitarian Pathology of Law
A Concise Theory of Post-Totalitarian Oppression
Law as Petrified Oppression
Conclusions
Bibliography