Social Oppression

Social Oppression Synopsis

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.