Praxis pietatis: A tribute to Edward Shils

Abstract

The preparation of this lecture made me realize once again, and perhaps more clearly than ever, the power of Culture over us. When I was approached last spring about the title of a proposed seminar, I had just returned from a memorial service, held at the University of Chicago, for Professor Edward Shils, a great sociologist who died on January 23 this year, and I immediately said that I would deliver a lecture to honor his memory. Since his life was dedicated to the study of culture, "Culture and Civilization" appeared an appropriate rubric, but I had no idea what I would talk about, which exactly of the many themes in his work I would evoke, or, most importantly, why?what for?was I doing this? After the fact, one can come up with any number of reasons. My reasons might be peda gogical: a discussion of "Culture and Civilization" could not properly proceed without an attempt to understand what?in fact?culture is, to develop a gen eral theory of culture; Edward Shils had developed the thoroughest?the most serious, careful, and searching?such theory. I also might have a personal rea son: Edward Shils was a very important man in my life; his death was a great loss; I have not come to grips with it so far; talking about him makes me feel as if, in a way, I am still talking to him?this lecture, therefore, could have a therapeutic function. But the fact is that these were not the reasons. My decision was not a result of reasoning at all: I simply felt I owed it to this now dead man, who would never know whether I did this or not. I knew this was the right thing to do. It was what Max Weber called a value-rational action, whose reward lay in itself, because it was intrinsically moral. In brief, I was impelled by a force far greater than me, the Culture of which I am a part. Edward Shils died at the age of eighty-four. A month before his death he graded the papers from his last seminar. He was still working on the drafts of his own last essays. He started to write and teach in the 1930s; his career had