Leading sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz examines the response social science has made to contemporary subjects and issues: the so-called "new class" of the intelligentsia, the ecology movement, social planning, alienation, privatization, anomie, the threat of nuclear war. Horowitz evaluates as a social scientist the question of values—those disclosed through analysis, and those threatened by it—and discusses the overall political and moral impact of knowledge and methodology in social science.