Edward Shils Research Articles

A comment on the discussion of Conrad Russell's academic freedom

The discussions of Conrad Russell's Academic Freedom that have appeared in recent issues of Minerva 1 are remarkable, among other virtues, for the diversity of their approaches. This arises no doubt in part because approaches to the identification of enemies of, and threats to, a major human activity may in themselves define the quality that is to be defended. General rhetoric about academic freedom has often in the past shown even wider diversity, but may then be found to be primarily in defence of, say, property or trade union rights. The interest in this case is that we have here, in a major learned journal, responses to a fully measured assessment by a serious scholar of a serious question. Such diversity may also arise because the body of authoritative comment concerned specifically with academic freedom is limited; criteria against which measurements might be made are, as Edward Shils notes in his contribution, rare.2 It is therefore not easy to compare the degrees to which academic freedom is enjoyed, still less to compare the degrees of academic freedom that were enjoyed at different times in history. Lord Ashby's unusually extensive discussion of academic freedom, once much quoted, is prescriptive in tone, but does little more than describe half a dozen systems in which the freedoms spring mainly from conventions conceded or exported by politicians.3 Indeed Professor Russell's book is notable not only as the most ambitious statement of authority in recent years, but also because such ambition is so rare. And, neither he nor the discussants appeal to earlier attempts to provide authority in this field.

Quantity, Quality, and Source

When I took my first course in comparative education a quarter of a century ago, I was presented with a series of readings that seemed to fall into the following types of materials. First, there were references to some of the nineteenth-century travelers-Horace Mann, Mathew Arnold, Joseph Kay-who brought back impressions of education in foreign lands for domestic consideration. Second, there were references to some who tried to systematize the results of these kinds of impressions-Sir Michael Sadler, I. L. Kandel, Bereday. Third, there were references to great minds drawn from philosophy or from the social sciences generally that were of interest to comparative education but that were of interest as well to many other lines of inquiry-Plato, Leo Tolstoy, Max Weber, Emil Durkheim, Clifford Geertz, Edward Shils, Stuart Eisenstadt, and David Apter. Either they had thought about education, or they were contributors to compelling theories in which education played a rolemodernization, tradition, center and periphery, economic development, civic culture, stratification. Fourth, there were references to those who had begun to measure and estimate what it was about education that seemed to make a difference in society-Philip Foster, Torsten Husen, Alex Inkeles, Yuri Bronfenbrenner, Edward Denison, and John McClelland. Their purpose was to study education as though it were like any other social function-religion, law, and medicine, for instance. They were curious about whether education's role and function were similar

The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine: A Centennial Reappraisal

Notes on contributors Foreword Sir John Lyons Introduction Alan Diamond 1. The Victorian values of Sir Henry Maine George Feaver Part I. Maine and the Idea of Progress: 2. Henry Maine and mid-Victorian ideas of progress John W. Burrow 3. Maine, progress and theory Raymond Cocks 4. Maine and the theory of progress Krishan Kumar 5. Democracy and excitement: Maine's political pessimism Stefan Collini Part II. Maine and the Social Sciences: 6. The rise and fall of Maine's patriarchal society Adam Kuper 7. Some contributions of Maine to history and anthropology Alan D. J. Macfarlane 8. Henry Sumner Maine in the tradition of the analysis of society Edward Shils 9. Maine as an ancestor of the social sciences J. D. Y. Peel 10. Ancient Law and modern fieldwork Ray Abrahams Part III. Maine on Law, Legal Change and Legal Education: 11. Maine and legal education Peter G. Stein 12. Maine and legal education: a comment William Twining 13. A wake (or awakening?) for historical jurisprudence Calvin Woodard 14. Further thoughts on Maine's historical jurisprudence David E. C. Yale 15. Fictions, equity and legislation: Maine's three agencies of legal change Alan Diamond 16. Law and language: a metaphor in Maine, a model for his successors? Bernard S. Jackson 17. Linguistics and law: the legacy of Sir Henry Maine John Lyons Part IV. Maine and India: 18. The influence of Sir Henry Maine on agrarian policy in India Clive Dewey 19. India and Henry Maine Gordon Johnson 20. Maine and change in nineteenth-century India C. A. Bayly Appendix: the conference programme Bibliography Index.

The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals.

Editorial preface Alan Montefiore 1. Introduction Peter Winch 2. La trahison de la trahison des clercs Ernest Gellner 3. The loss of responsibility Elemer Hankiss 4. Heritage and collective responsibility Jerzy Jedlicki 5. Power and wisdom: the expert as mediating figure in contemporary Polish history Jacek Kurczewski 6. Textual responsibility J. J. Lecercle 7. Politics, technology and the responsibility of the intellectuals David J. Levy 8. The intellectuals and the imitation of the masses Grahame Lock 9. Responsibility and the act of interpretation: the case of law Ian Maclean 10. The Hungarian intellectual and the choice of commitment of neutrality Miklos Molnar (translated by Ian Maclean) 11. The political responsibility of intellectuals Alan Montefiore 12. Intellectuals between politics and culture Jerzy Szacki 13. The political irresponsibility of intellectuals G. M. Tamas 14. Intellectuals and responsibility Edward Shils Index of names.

Robert E. Park's congo papers: A gothic perspective on capitalism and imperialism

In a recently published personal reminiscence of Robert E. Park that also contains a subtle critique of his place among the master-thinkers of the sociological discipline, Edward Shils asserts that Park's "work would have had a longer life if he had been able to draw on Max Weber's writings in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft and the Gesammelte Aufs?tze zur Reliqionssocioloqie, and if he had studied and pondered Durkheim's and Mauss's writings."1 Of course, Park was not unaware of Weber's verstehende sociology ?he referred to it in one of his writings in the 1930s2?nor was he ignorant of the contributions of Durkheim and Mauss to sociological thought ?in the index to the famous "Green Bible," i.e., the Introduction to the Science of Sociology by Park and Ernest W. Burgess, to which Shils finds occasion to refer in another part of his essay,3 Durkheim is referenced in twenty-five places and Mauss in two.4 The problem does not arise because of any lacunae in Park's reading; indeed, Shils has misstated the issue. Currently, Park's work is in process of devaluation ? (e.g., Lewis Coser has consigned his efforts to those of "a great teacher who managed to inspire his students . . . [but who] wrote relatively little himself . . . [and who] was content ... to develop a series of general ideas and sensitizing concepts . . ,"5) ?and diminution ?(e.g., the fifteen references to Park in Neil Smelser's edition of The Handbook of Sociology mention, and then only briefly and usually to criticize, his conception of "emotional contagion"; his ecological and biotic orientation to the study

The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present

This book contains an innovative and important series of studies of the complex relations of major cities associated with key moments in the history of higher learning in the West. By exploring the interplay of university learning and civic culture over the centuries, Bender provides a novel perspective on the history of both universities and cities. The theme is pursued in studies of Bologna, Paris, Florence, Leiden, Geneva, Edinburgh, London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Chicago, and New York by several distinguished scholars, including Gene Brucker, Carl Schorske, Edward Shils, Martin Jay, and Nathan Glazer.

The integrative revolution revisited

Contrary to the predictions of modernization theorists, social relationships grounded in assumed ties of blood, race, language, and religion remain a powerful force in both developing and industrial nations. Contemporary theories of political and economic development are inadequate for understanding the role of these “primordial ties” because, in rejecting modernization theory for its shortcomings, they have abandoned systematic consideration of cultural and symbolic phenomena. A reevaluation of the work of Edward Shils and Clifford Geertz, and an examination of recent developments in anthropology and history suggest new ways in which the dynamic role of cultural and symbolic processes in development can be understood.

Economics at Columbia: Recollections of the Early 1930S

Two articles, one by W. Allen Wallis on the Mathematical Statistics Group at Columbia University during World War II,1 and the other by Edward Shils on his graduate student days at the University of Chicago in the 1930s,2 have encouraged me to set down my recollections of the Economics Department at Columbia Univer sity during the early 1930s when Wesley Clair Mitchell and John Maurice Clark gave it luster, if not leadership. Their peers in the economics profession at large had selected Mitchell and Clark as the first and second recipients respec tively of the John Bates Clark medal awarded by the American Economic Association to those who had made the greatest contributions to the advance of the discipline. Within three short years at the end of the 1920s the center of gravity of the Economics Department at Columbia shifted radically. In 1928 Henry Moore, an early contributor to mathematical-statistical studies of economics, retired and disappeared from the academic scene where he had never played a prominent role. In 1930 Edwin R. A. Seligman, the long-term chairman of the department suffered a mild heart attack; he retired to be succeeded by Henry Seager, a specialist in labor, who died that same summer while on a visit to Eastern Europe. Seligman was a man of parts. Three decades earlier he had written a little book, The Economic Interpretation of History which pro vided academic respectability to American scholars who sought to deal seriously with Karl Marx.3 He had a long list of contributions to public finance and had played an important role in getting the federal income tax law onto the books. A man of independent means, he supported many students, especially foreign students who ran out of funds. Just prior to his retirement he had completed a major inquiry into consumer credit, a project financed by General Motors, for which it was reported he had received a fee of $250,000 ($2 million in 1989 dollars!) Seligman concluded that there was nothing wrong from the viewpoint of economics or ethics in consumers buying on credit. A Jew by birth, and a leading member of the Ethical Culture Society, Seligman was much conflicted about his Jewishness, especially when confronting those of Zionist persuasion. He once told me that he had contributed to the University of Calcutta but, as a matter of principle, refused to make a donation to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Aware of the anti-Semitism in elite U.S. universities, he was concerned about the prospects of young Jewish academicians. One amusing episode: After his retirement, he continued to come to the campus and sought to stay abreast of what was happening. I told him in one of our frequent meetings of a talented new student, Moses Abramovitz. He asked how he spelled his name. When I indicated it was with a v rather than a w, Seligman indicated great relief. The hard core of the old department in addition to Seligman, Seager and Moore in cluded Vladimir G. Simkhovitch who offered courses on socialism and economic history. Russian by birth and German by education, Simkhovitch, even with the perspective of time is not easy to characterize and even harder to evaluate. A collector of Chinese art and a grower of delphiniums in Perry, Maine, he was recognized as an expert in both fields. Most students, the bright as well as the dull, considered his lectures somewhat tedious dis traction from serious work on contemporary economics; they had little interest in his exhaustion of the soil explanation for the decline of Rome4 or his Edward Bernstein-modified critique of Karl Marx.5 But a few of us recognized V. G.'s insightfulness and over looked his failings, defects which included a proneness for character defamation and vindic tiveness as well as immature behavior toward female students.

Center: ideas and institutions

There are several concepts within the social sciences that refer to the fundamental realities on which the various disciplines focus their attention. The concept of the center, as defined by Edward Shils, has such a status in sociology, for it deals with and attempts to provide an answer to the question of the discipline the question of the constitution of society. Center is a commonly used term with a variety of meanings. According to editors Liah Greenfeld and Michel Martin, carries a twofold meaning when used as a concept. In its first sense, it is a synonym for central value system, referring to irreducible values and beliefs that establish the identity of individuals and bind them into a common universe. In its second sense, refers to central institutional system, the authoritative institutions and persons who often express or embody the value system. Both meanings imply a corresponding idea of referring both to the elements of society that need to be integrated and to institutions and persons who lack authority. The original essays compiled in this volume examine and apply the concept of the center in different contexts. The contributors come from a broad range of disciplines classics, religion, philosophy, history, literary criticism, anthropology, political science, and sociology which serves to underscore the far-reaching significance of the Shilsean theory of society. The interrelated subsets of the center-periphery theme addressed here include: symbolic systems, intellectuals, the expansion of the center into the periphery, parallel concepts in the work of other scholars besides Shils, and the paths of research inspired by these concepts. The volume features an introspective essay by Shils himself, in which he reexamines his ideas in the light of new experiences and the ideas of others, some of them contained in this volume. By drawing together such diverse scholars around a unified idea, this collection achieves a cohesion that makes it an exciting contribution to the comparative analysis of social and cultural systems. A collective effort in social theory, Center: Ideas and Institutions is a testimony to the breadth and complexity of one of man's ideas.

Theory and Method in Recent British Sociology: Whither the Empirical Impulse?

Theory and Method in Recent British Sociology: Whither the Empirical Impulse?

Essays on the History of British Sociological Research.

Preface Part I. Introduction: 1. The development of sociology and of empirical social research in Britain Martin Bulmer Part II. History: 2. Social monitors: population censuses as social surveys C. Hakim 3. The emergence of the sociological survey, 1887-1939 Raymond Kent 4. Durkheim, Booth and Yule: the non-diffusion of an intellectual innovation Hannan C. Selvin and Christopher Bernert 5. The Governmental Social Survey Frank Whitehead 6. Methodological research on sample surveys: a review of developments in Britain Gerald Hoinville 7. Mass-Observation 1937-1949 Angus Calder 8. The Institute of Community Studies Peter Willmott 9. Provincials and professionals: the British post-war sociologists A. H. Halsey 10. On the eve: a prospect in retrospect Edward Shils Part III. Use: 11. The uses of British sociology, 1831-1981 Philip Abrams 12. Informants, respondents and citizens Catherine Marsh 13. Surveys of poverty to promote democracy Peter Townsend 14. Reading the palm of the invisible hand: indicators, progress and prediction Lorraine F. Baric Index.

Fictions of Power: A Note on Ideological Discourse in the Humanities

Fictions of Power: A Note on Ideological Discourse in the Humanities

The Nature of Tradition

The temporal aspect of ethnology' includes the fact that artifacts and technologies have been used over often considerable time-spans in the past, customs have been perpetuated, and linguistic patterns maintained. These continuities come together in practical patternings of the working of human minds over time, which is to say that they are cultural continuities. 'Tradition' is the word which commonsense applies to such cultural continuity, often in a more particularistic way with reference to 'a tradition'. The sociologist Edward Shils concurs with this view. 'In its barest, most elementary sense.. .' tradition is '. . anything which is transmitted or handed down from the past to the present', Shils taking his cue from the Latin origin of the word.2 He stresses that as a concept, tradition has no regard for substance or institutional setting.

Kimball Young on the Chicago School

Editors' Introduction: Elsewhere in this journal is the article “Kimball Young on Founders of the Chicago School.” As with that article, the following material is taken from the 1968 seminar offered by Kimball Young at Arizona State University, a seminar attended by the editors. These lectures chronicle Young's contacts with George Herbert Mead of the University of Chicago's philosophy department, touch on his student contacts with the political scientist Harold Lasswell, and contain Young's comments upon a number of Chicago faculty and student sociologists he knew: Herbert Blumer, Ernest Watson Burgess, John Dollard, Ellsworth Faris, Philip M. Hauser, Everett Cherrington Hughes, Helen McGill Hughes, Morris Janowitz, William Fielding Ogburn, Robert E. Park, Edward Shils, David Riesman, Samuel A. Stouffer, W. I. Thomas, W. Lloyd Warner, and Louis Wirth.

No End of Ideology

Since its coinage in the eighteenth century, the concept of ideology has been recurrently invoked as a tool of analysis, a term of abuse, or both together. The concept is central to the theories of Marx, Mannheim, and others, and the whole subject of the sociology of knowledge is an elaboration upon it. But just what the concept is meant to convey is normally so unclear or controversial, even question-begging, that it is natural to want to dispense with the concept entirely. That, in part, was what the advocates of the end-of-ideology—like Raymond Aron, Edward Shils, and Daniel Bell—urged back in the 1950s. But these would-be defenders of reason, pragmatism, and political centrism were almost immediately and quite predictably attacked for themselves being the victims or purveyors of an ideology. Whether or not they were, the lesson is evident: the issues of ideology are not likely to go away.

Social Democracy and Bureaucracy

The Labour Party in Great Britain has been committed to the principle of equality and has addressed itself both in rhetoric and in practice to furthering the equalitarian ideal in power and authority relationships in English society, viz., in Parliament and industrial organizations. However, though the Party has relied heavily on the bureaucracy for effecting social democracy, the Party has had little interest in equalitarian access to the Higher Civil Service, which has traditionally recruited predominantly middle-class Oxbridge graduates. The explanation lies in the joint membership of Labour Party intellectuals and civil servants in what Edward Shils, has called the "aristo-gentry" culture.

Universities, Politicians, and Bureaucrats: Europe and the United States. Hans Daalder , Edward Shils

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsUniversities, Politicians, and Bureaucrats: Europe and the United States. Hans Daalder , Edward Shils Ulrich TeichlerUlrich Teichler Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Education Volume 93, Number 2Feb., 1985 Sponsored by the Penn State College of Education Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/443803 Views: 2Total views on this site Copyright 1985 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Pluralism and Responsibility in Post-Modern Science

Stephen Toulmin: Having been, I suppose, the only living person to have studied at the feet of both Dirac and Wittgenstein, I retain a strong sense of the spirit of Aristotle's account of practical wisdom. That is, true progress in practical wisdom can only follow if one goes into a particular field and analyzes the nature of the problems that arise. Only in that way can one begin to understand what is mysterious, what needs explaining, and what needs investigating in the terms that are appropriate for that particular field. The idea that there is a single method for attacking scientific problems for scientists of all kinds does not get us much further than the notion that there is a single set of medical principles that will apply to all cases a physician may encounter, or a single set of moral principles that can give us answers to the human problems with which we find ourselves confronted. There is probably no one method appropriate even to inquiries in a given scientific field at different stages in its development. The recurrence of this case approach or pluralistic approach to practical wisdom as a motif in the history of philosophy is striking. Albert Jonsen of the University of California Medical School has pointed out that Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, draws a telling comparison between the tasks that a wise confessor and a prudent physician face when they seek to arrive at some moral or medical diagnosis. Aquinas says that the wise confessor, like the prudent physician, will suspend judgment until he has satisfied himself that he knows all about a particular case with which he is concerned. He will go astray if he goes into a situation with fixed ideas about what the case is and what he said about it. I find the Aquinas point of view linking moral judgment and technical (or clinical) judgment is still very much on the mark. In medicine, the question of how a physician sees a case and manages it, even in its technical aspects, requires that the human implications involved in following one course of treatment rather than another be weighed. So the practice of medicine, even in a technical sense, becomes a moral exercise. And the line between its moral and technical aspects becomes progressively blurred. I want to explore with you today how such considerations bear on differing concepts of scientific progress, why those concepts affect the question of social responsibility, and how they carry over into the activities you support at the National Science Foundation. I have been thinking about the intellectual foundations of science policy at least since Edward Shils commissioned and published a seminal series of articles in Minerva in the early 1960s.1 My concerns are not simply a by product of my interests in the philosophical aspect of the theory of science. For the question of scientific choice and the respective roles of the scientist, the administration, the electorate, and the electorates' representatives in Congress, is very much bound up with different ideas about the nature of scientific progress, and is therefore central to the mission and operation of the NSF. To understand something about how and why concepts of scientific progress have changed over the past 300 years, it is useful to reflect on some of the implications of the vast expansion in the scope of scientific inquiry since Laplace asserted at the end of the 18th century that natural philosophers could aspire to become omniscient cal-

Political sociology and political reality: The concept of democratic consensus

Abstract The investigation of consensus was a leading theme in the political sociology of democracy from the early 1950s until the late 1960s. Consensus has since become something of a suspect category of social inquiry. The consensus literature (V. O. Key, R. Dahl, H. Eckstein, S. M. Upset, G. A. Almond) has been charged by the ‘post‐behaviouralists’ as conservative politics disguised as impartial social science. This paper investigates the possibility of restoring consensus as a research category through an examination of its original use by John Stuart Mill. The link between Mill and contemporary political sociology is Edward Shils, who is here identified as one of the guiding spirits of the consensus literature. The paper compares consensus as treated in Mill's explicitly political science with Shils’ implicitly political science. The ‘post‐behaviouralists’ sought the recovery of the political as the leading theme of social inquiry. This is exactly as Mill originally intended. The consensus literature...

Tradition, Genuine or Spurious

LIKE MANY SCHOLARLY CONCEPTS, is at once a commonsense and a scientific category. In its commonsense meaning, tradition refers to an inherited body of customs and beliefs. In the social sciences, an ongoing discourse has attempted to refine this understanding of tradition as it has proven empirically and theoretically inadequate. Recent efforts to clarify the concept of tradition, most notably those of Edward Shils (1971, 1981), do much to add nuance to our conventional understanding but leave unresolved a major ambiguity: does tradition refer to a core of inherited culture traits whose continuity and boundedness are analogous to that of a natural object, or must tradition be understood as a wholly symbolic construction? We will argue that the latter is the only viable understanding-a conclusion we have arrived at by comparing our independent investigations in two quite disparate ethnographic situations. In our attempts to analyze national and ethnic identification in Quebec and Hawaii we have concluded that tradition cannot be defined in terms of boundedness, givenness, or essence. Rather, tradition refers to an interpretive process that embodies both continuity and discontinuity. As a scientific concept, tradition fails when those who use it are unable to detach it from the implications of Western common sense, which presumes that an unchanging core of ideas and customs is always handed down to us from the past. As many writers have noted (e.g., Eisenstadt 1973; Rudolph and Rudolph 1967; Singer 1972; Tipps 1973), one inadequacy of the conventional understanding of tradition is that it posits a false dichotomy between tradition and modernity as fixed and mutually exclusive states. M. E. Smith (1982) has pointed out that and are interpretive rather than descriptive terms: since all cultures change ceaselessly, there can only be what is new, although what is new can take on symbolic value as traditional. Following Smith's lead, we can see that designating any part of culture as old or new, traditional or modern, has two problematic implications. First, this approach encourages us to see culture and tradition naturalistically, as bounded entities made up of constituent parts that are themselves bounded objects. Second, in this atomistic paradigm we treat culture and its constituents as entities having an essence apart from our interpretation of them; we attempt to specify, for example, which trait is old, which new, and to show how traits fit