Mr. Etzioni's latest book, Capital Corruption, was a plea for more stringent

revisions of the campaign-finance laws, which had first been passed in 1971 and had been the subject of court cases (including a landmark one brought by then-Senators McCarthy and James Buckley, eventually decided as Buckley v. Valeo), and congressional responses to them. To Mr. Etzioni, sociologist, money is the root of most political evil. To Mr. McCarthy, sometime political practitioner (who to be sure is also a poet and philosopher), "There are other temptations. You see, we're operating as though the greatest temptation was money. We know the classical temptations were of a higher order. There was the temptation of power and, beyond that, of pride."