Walden Two: A 1950 Review

Abstract

The following review of B. F. Skinner's Walden Two (1948) 1 was written forty years ago, not long after the book was originally publisbed. My manuscript was set in type -I have the galley proofs -but never appeared in print. I have been asked to describe the circumstances. From 1939, when I graduated from high schoo~ until 1951, when I left New York for Indiana, I probably spent more of my time campaigning against nationalism and war and for a socialist society than I did pursuing my studies. I thought of myself as a person whose mission in life was to transform the existing social order. One of my reasons for taking up psychology was that I agreed with Floyd Allport's contention (Institutional Behavior, 1933) that, when closely examined, social institutions turn out to be nothing more than the activities of their individual participants. Accordingly, I concluded that the best way to understand the functioning of various institutions must be through the study of individual behavior. Another reason was more practical: I hoped to earn my living in a way that would not be harmful to others and in a setting that would give me some license to speak on political matters but would leave me relatively free of pressures to conform to the viewpoint of any single political or economic organization. From 1943 to 1949 I pursued my graduate studies at Columbia, and from 1946 to 1951 I taught classes there, mostly in the School of General Studies. Through the influence of Fred Keller and Nat Schoenfeld I had become familiar with Skinner's writings (see Dinsmoor, 1990), and when his second book, Walden Two, appeared I inlmediately purchased and read it. I considered it an extremely innovative and significant contribution to our thinking on the way society should be organized and tried to think of ways of bringing it to the attention of other people who migllt be interested in that issue. For about ten years I had been a member of the National Executive Committee of the Young People's Socialist League, the youth section of the Socialist Party, and between my undergraduate and my graduate studies I had even served for a brief period as its National Secretary. But the Socialist Party's endorsement of the American military intervention in Korea proved the last straw, and in desperation the political grouping to which I belonged withdrew from the SP and