Dark Side of Affluence
The Quest for Fellowship. By Ferdynand Zweig. (Heinemann, 30s.) The Quest for Fellowship. By Ferdynand Zweig. (Heinemann, 30s.)
FERDYNAND ZWE1G's stock-in-trade is curiosity about his fellow human beings. After each of his sallies as a one-man social survey team, he finds that he has generated more new questions than he has gathered answers. The Quest for Fellow- ship is a combined professional autobiography and recapitulation of the author's earlier studies on British life, with tentative conclusions drawn from them, particularly on the darker' side of affluence. It, begins with the end of the Second World War, when Zweig, an economist, found himself stranded here with the Polish govern- ment-in-exile. He acquired his new calling in a fit of absentmindedness and discovered that he enjoyed it. Unlike most sociologists, he is in- terested in the self as well as its attributes, and believes that through sympathetic understanding of the attributes one can reach closer to the self. Hence the book's title.
Zweig's most important contribution deals With the pathology of affluence. As, class-poverty de- clines, what he calls case-poverty, which inheres in the individual and family, remains to be dealt with. He draws attention to the process of nega- tive selection which accompanies the decline and contraction of classes, industries and localities, a concomitant of growth and change. The young and enterprising leave, the elderly, unenterpris- ing and the drifters dominate. Communities and industries stagnate and turn into slums, with men and women losing the will or the ability to catch up. The matter is all the more serious, Zweig points out, now that the British working-class itself is a contracting class, while social mobility has been made all the easier for those with am- bition. Since negative selection is a corollary of social mobility and dynamic change, those who press hardest for these developments should think more closely about their import. Zweig's book will indeed help them to do this.
ALFRED SI 'ERMAN
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