Search

Edward Shils was one of the giants of sociological theory in the period after World War II. In this autobiography, written three years before his death in 1995, Shils reflects on the remarkable range of his life's work and activities, including founding and editing the journal "Minerva", being a central figure in the Congress of Cultural Freedom, serving as a founding member of the editorial board of "The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists", and being a member of the International Council on the Future of the University. Shils recognizes that a unity of concern runs through his many theoretical writings and activities. Early in his life, the concern was expressed as understanding the character of consensus. During the last fifteen years of his life, he refined his understanding of consensus through investigation of the nature of "collective self-consciousness." That concern was the structure and character of the moral order of a society, and, in particular, liberal, democratic society. Accompanying the autobiography are two unpublished essays, "Society, Collective Self-Consciousness and Collective Self-Consciousnesses" and "Collective Self-Consciousness and Rational Choice," two areas of intellectual concern discussed in the autobiography. The book contains fascinating discussion of many of the people Shils knew throughout his illustrious career: Robert Park, Louis Wirth, Talcott Parsons, Karl Mannheim, Michael Polanyi, Audrey Richards, Karl Popper, Robert Merton, and many others. They represent Shils' final formulations on the character of society and its moral order. As such, it is a most important contribution both to the history of the social sciences in the twentieth century and to sociological theory.

What follows is a selection of notes made by Edward Shils (handwritten on eleven pages of legal-size foolscap) on Parsons's draft manuscript. The com ments selected (which constitute the bulk of the original material) were those that sought to clarify and evaluate Parsons's claims, to suggest reformulations of specific passages, and to offer interpretations of the terms and concepts used by Simmel. Shils's comments reveal an interpretation of Simmel and German thought that differs in many respects from the one provided by Parsons.

L'A. porte son attention sur la perspective sociologique elaboree par R. E. Park. Il montre que ce dernier a ete considerablement influence par G. Simmel, M. Weber, T. Tonnies, E. Durkheim, W. I. Thomas et H. S. Maine. Il analyse les conceptions de Park en ce qui concerne l'organisation des societes modernes. Il souligne l'interet porte par ce dernier a la notion de conscience collective et examine sa vision des relations interraciales et de la notion d'assimilation. Il estime que Park n'a pas su mettre en lumiere les processus d'assimilation et les mecanismes de stratification sociale. Il s'efforce de comprendre les raisons de l'oubli de son œuvre

This article vindicates the phenomenon of the nation and argues that civil society could not exist without it. The nation, although related to nationalism, is by no means identical with it. Extreme forms of nationalism are generally speaking iniquitous and in many cases severely damaging to the societies in which they occur. The same stricture does not apply to the nation.

practicable where the academic person in question has been appointed on permanent tenure. In this respect and to this extent, appointment on permanent tenure is a protection of academic freedom. The abrogation of the contractual obligation undertaken by a university in making an appointment on permanent (or indefinite) tenure places the university in a difficult situation; it renders it subject to legal action and public obloquy. In the United States, it might even call down the censure of the American Association of University Professors, which university administrators try very hard to avoid. University administrators in the United States nowadays are usually reluctant to face such embarrassment. If dismissal or refusal to promote were the only sanctions against persons whose views on intellectual, religious or political matters were offensive to their superiors, academic or governmental, then the academic freedom of the persons in question would be effectively protected by appointments on permanent tenure. (I do not deal here with discrimination against women or African-Americans, except in so far as their beliefs and actions are concerned. Discrimination on grounds of sex or race or ethnicity per se are not considered in these pages.) Academic freedom however is subject to restraint or restriction by numerous sanctions short of dismissal or the refusal to reappoint The refusal of promotion in rank and the refusal of rises in salary are examples of such sanctions; so are the denial of a teacher's proposal or application to teach certain courses which he (or she) is qualified to teach and which fall within the syllabus of the department. There are other ways of injuring a teacher who is disapproved of because of his (or her) intellectual, political or religious attitudes or activities. Boycotting a teacher socially, not inviting him (or her) to "faculty parties", assigning office space more inconvenient

with academic obligation. The activities of the committee on academic freedom and tenure made up most of the agenda of activities of the Association; the committee on academic obligations had never once met, according to Dewey's recollection. The American Association of University Professors was a product of the situation in which some of the leading university teachers in the country thought that, because the academic profession was entitled to respect as a calling, they were entitled to academic freedom. Even in the second decade of the twentieth century, powerful persons outside the universities, and within the universities trustees, presidents, and deans, or heads of departments still regarded their academic staffs as hired hands to be appointed and dismissed at will. Such persons were regarded as the enemies of academic freedom. Although there are still some rough-handed presidents and deans in back-country colleges and state universities, on the whole these traditional enemies of academic freedom are seldom any longer to be seen. In the minds of the American academics who were active in the early years of the Association, academic freedom and permanence of tenure were indissolubly associated with each other. At that time, it was said that the latter was needed to guarantee the former. Academic freedom was declared to be an assurance that new ideas would be discovered, that sound old ideas would be appreciated in a more critical way, and that unsound ones would be discarded. The argument for academic freedom was roughly the argument for liberty in general put forth by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. It was also

This paper shows how a number of the social sciences — sociology, economics, and anthropology in particular — came to have their modern form in the universities of the West. It argues that although their beginnings were salutary, their present state leaves much to be desired. In particular, far from supporting a democratic order, they are just as likely to undermine it. Sociology, for example, has abandoned its claim to truth and is given over to an insidious relativism. It undermines democratic values and gives the young little reason to believe that it is a discipline that can contribute anything to the betterment of society. There is, perhaps, some hope that the university, with its commitment to truth and to freedom of thought, will ultimately transform such wayward disciplines into something worth having.

SINCE MONTESQUIEU, WRITERS ON POLITICS HAVE BEEN aware that there might be an association of particular moral qualities and beliefs with particular political regimes. The association between virtue and republican governments, although duly recorded by students of Montesquieu's thought, has however been passed over. The disposition to participate in politics, the sense of political potency or impotence, certain traits of personality such as could be summarized in the term ‘authoritarian personality’, etc., have all been studied by theorists of democracy. Virtue, or public spirit or civility, has been neglected.I would like to take up Montesquieu's theme once more. I wish to enquire into the place of virtue or what I call civility in the liberal democratic order, which Montesquieu referred to as the republican type of government. Latterly the term ‘civil society’ has come to be used very loosely as equivalent to ‘liberal democratic society’. They are not entirely the same and the difference between them is significant. In civility lies the difference between a well-ordered and a disordered liberal democracy.

Cet article s’interroge sur les raisons de la forte cohesion de l’armee allemande tout au long de la Deuxieme Guerre mondiale. Informes notamment par l’interrogatoire de prisonniers de guerre et d’intensifs entretiens psychologiques, les auteurs degagent et explicitent la notion de « fonction du groupe elementaire » pour comprendre la resistance du soldat allemand. C’est la satisfaction des principaux besoins elementaires (subsistances et soins, affection et estime des camarades et des superieurs, etc.) qui assure la cohesion de l’unite de combat. Celle-ci se trouve renforcee par l’existence d’un « noyau dur » et la communaute d’experience. La desagregation du groupe elementaire croit avec l’egocentrisme : isolement du soldat, souci anxiogene de sa famille, instinct de conservation. L’article etudie aussi le role du sentiment de l’honneur militaire, et les relations d’autorite entre le soldat, ses sous-officiers et officiers. Il examine enfin l’efficacite de symboles secondaires (ethique patriotique, idees politiques, devotion a Hitler) dans la construction de cette cohesion, ainsi que le processus de leur desagregation.

THE INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS REQUIRED FOR THE freedom of expression of beliefs and the representation of intertests and ideals – both of which can be divisive – can function effectively in society if those who use them for their own particularistic ends are at the same time restrained by an admixture of civility. Public liberties are conditions of the proposition, confrontation and persuasion of contending beliefs, of their cultivation in autonomous corporate bodies and of their presentation to public authorities. Representative institutions are the arrangements through which contending beliefs and interests are brought forward, considered and taken into account in the making of laws governing the territorially bounded society. The institutions in which beliefs and desires or interests are proposed and confronted in argument and the institutions in which beliefs and interests are taken into account and digested discriminatingly into law cannot work acceptably without some constituent civility and consensus of the contending parties. If the contending parties are vehemently irreconcilable and if effectively contending beliefs and interests are very widely disparate, one or another of the groups will resist physically or seek to impose its will by coercion and actual violence on the other. The representative institutions cannot moreover work effectively if they have too many tasks to master and if the different contending parties within them are irreconcilable to the point where they deny the legitimacy of the institutions themselves, of the procedures for arriving at decisions and the decisions themselves, should those decisions be uncongenial to their own beliefs and interests.

The history of the order of learning in the United States between the end of the Civil War and the end of the First World War may be seen largely as the history of a fundamental change in the institutional structure of learning; one particular class of institutions became dominant over other classes of learned institutions and particular institutions within that newly dominant class became especially dominant. The universities as seats of learning gained ascendancy over other institutional forms for the discovery and diffusion of knowledge. The ascendancy consisted in superiority in productivity qualitative and quantitative and in prestige. The prestige was equally prestige of institutions, prestige of works, prestige of individuals. The prestige was accorded both within the order of learning and by the wider public. The ascendancy of the academic order within the order of learning was accompanied by and in a certain measure furthered by the ascendancy of a small number of universities as the centre of the academic order.

The decade before the outbreak of the Second World War had been a very hard time for universities. The worldwide economic depression affected universities as it affected all other institutions. In Great Britain, which was perhaps least injured, the chances of employment of university graduates did not decline markedly, but the universities did not recruit many young members to their teaching staffs. The already established university teachers were not loosened from their moorings. A small number became communists or supporters of communism, but this did not interfere with their performance of the tasks of teaching and research to which they had committed themselves.1 They did not attempt to impel their universities towards their own political objectives. Under the dominion of an ungenerous ministerial bureaucracy, French universities carried on in a humdrum way. Their graduates were finding it difficult to obtain employment, their teachers were becoming somewhat more radical politically. Nonetheless, French academics retained their traditional views that teaching was a chore, that the supervision of dissertations was a little better, and that to do scientific or scholarly research was best of all.

WHEN THE ARGUMENT FOR THE UTILIZATION OF THE RESULTS of scientific knowledge for the improvement of human life was first laid out, it was thought that the state would be a major promoter or patron of such research by encouragement, financial assistance and institutional aid. It was not anticipated that the state needed the advancement of scientific knowledge for the enhancement of its own powers, apart from that enhancement which resulted from the increased wealth furthered by scientific knowledge and its enhanced military power. At the end of nearly four centuries of development of opinion on this subject, government has come to be not only the major patron but also one of the major users of scientific knowledge for its own activities.

I. It is said by some students of ritual that it is a response to danger. By re-enacting contact with sacred things and re-affirming their rightness, ritual enables the crisis to be confronted and dealt with an anticipation of effectiveness. Ritual is a pattern of symbolic actions for renewing contact with the sacred, with the source and centre of rightness. It is a protection against destructive and immoral forces. It sanctifies the participant by infusing him with a tincture of sacredness, which is a state of being. Ceremony and etiquette belong to the same family, although at different distances from its centre.