The calling of social thought: Rediscovering the work of Edward Shils 9781526120069

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The calling of social thought

The calling of social thought Rediscovering the work of Edward Shils Edited by Christopher Adair-Toteff and Stephen Turner

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2019 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN  978 1 5261 2005 2  hardback First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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To the memory of Edward Shils, from those who have known him and those who wished they had, and to those whose encounter with his thought lies in the future

Contents

List of contributors ix Introduction: discovering and rediscovering Shils Stephen P. Turner

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1 The philosophical anthropology of Edward Shils Steven Grosby

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2 The sociologist as human scientist: the meaning of Shils Thomas Schneider

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3 The recovery of tradition Lenore T. Ealy

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4 Edward Shils and Michael Polanyi: the terms of engagement Phil Mullins

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5 Shils, Mannheim, and ideology Christopher Adair-Toteff

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6 Shils and Oakeshott Efraim Podoksik

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7 Edward Shils on pluralism and civility Richard Boyd

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8 Nations, nationality, and civil society in the work of Edward Shils Peter Mentzel 9 Shils and the intellectuals Jefferson Pooley

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10 Edward Shils and his Portraits 191 Bryan S. Turner

viii contents 11 Edward Shils: defender of the traditional university Philip G. Altbach

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12 Concluding comments: Edward Shils – the ‘outsider’ Christopher Adair-Toteff

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Appendix: Bibliography of the published works of Professor Edward Shils Christine C. Schnusenberg and Gordon B. Neavill

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References 245 Index 264

Contributors

Christopher Adair-Toteff is Fellow at the Center for Social and Political Thought, University of South Florida, Tampa, USA and teaches part time at Zeppelin Universität, Friedrichshafen, Germany. His focus is on classical German sociology and Neo-Kantianism. He is the author of Sociological Beginnings (2005), Fundamental Concepts in Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion (2015), and Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion (2016), and editor of The Anthem Companion to Ferdinand Toennies (2016) and The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch (2017). Philip G. Altbach is Research Professor and Founding Director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, USA, where from 1994 to 2015 he was the Monan University Professor. He has taught at Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of Global Perspectives on Higher Education, Turmoil and Transition (2016) and Student Politics in America (3rd edn 2011), among other books. He has co-edited a number of volumes. Richard Boyd is Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University, USA. He is author of Uncivil Society: The Perils of Pluralism and the Making of Modern Liberalism (2004), co-editor of Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy (2013), and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (forthcoming, 2018). Lenore T. Ealy is President of The Philanthropic Enterprise, Carmel, Indiana, an independent research institute in the United States that promotes the study of the social processes that facilitate human co-operation and flourishing. She is co-editor of the new book series, Polycentricity: Studies in Institutional Diversity and Voluntary Governance, and author of numerous articles on philanthropy, civil society, intellectual history, and other cultural topics. Steven Grosby is Professor of Religion at Clemson University, South Carolina, USA. He is author of Biblical Ideas of Nationality: Ancient and

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Modern (2002), Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction (2005), and many other works. He is editor of three volumes of Edward Shils’ writings: The Virtue of Civility: Selected Essays on Liberalism, Tradition, and Civil Society (1997), The Calling of Education: The Academic Ethic and Other Essays on Higher Education (1997), and A Fragment of a Sociological Autobiography: The History of My Pursuit of a Few Ideas (2006). Peter Mentzel is a Senior Fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc., Indiana, USA. His research focuses on the social and intellectual history of Central and South-eastern Europe, and on the history of nationalism. His publications include works on these subjects, as well as on nationalism and postcommunism, and on nationalism and Islam. Phil Mullins is Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Missouri Western State University, St. Joseph, Missouri, USA. For more than twenty years he was editor of Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Journal and he is currently President of the Polanyi Society. Efraim Podoksik is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Oakeshott (2012) and author of numerous publications in the field of political thought and intellectual history. He focuses especially on the British and German intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jefferson Pooley is Associate Professor of Media & Communication at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA. He is author of James W. Carey and Communication Research: Reputation at the University’s Margins (2016), and works on the history of social science, scholarly communications, and social media and the self. Thomas Schneider is author of Der sakrale Kern moderner Ordnungen: Zur Entwicklung des Werkes von Edward A. Shils (2016). He is a teacher of ethics at an elementary school, museum guide, soccer coach, and jazz musician based in Berlin, Germany. Bryan S. Turner is Professor of Sociology of Religion at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne; Honorary Professor of Sociology at Potsdam University, Germany; Emeritus Professor of Sociology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA; and a Fellow of the Edward Cadbury Centre at the University of Birmingham, UK. In 2015 he received the Max Planck Award, and his recent publication, as chief editor, is The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2017).



list of contributors

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Stephen P. Turner is Distinguished University Professor in Philosophy at the University of South Florida, Tampa, USA. He has written extensively on the history and philosophy of the social sciences and expertise, including extensive writings on Max Weber and on the problems of science and politics, including such books as Liberal Democracy 3.0 (2003) and Politics of Expertise (2013). His recent books include The Sage Handbook of Political Science Methodology (with William Outhwaite, 2007) and Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer (2018).

Introduction: discovering and rediscovering Shils Stephen P. Turner

Edward Shils was one of the twentieth century’s most influential and respected intellectuals. He received major awards and honours, including the Balzan Prize, a prize for scholars in fields without the Nobel Prize, and gave the Jefferson Lectures for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was for decades Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and a member of Cambridge University colleges, and moved in the most rarefied intellectual and literary circles. He was heavily involved in Encounter, a major mid-twentieth-century outlet for non-Communist intellectuals (which published a vast number of major literary, intellectual, and scientific figures), and with the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists. He founded and carefully edited the journal Minerva, which addressed the major issues of the relation of science to politics and society, and issues about universities (MacLeod, 2016). His personal life included a long-term and often contentious relationship with Saul Bellow, who used Shils repeatedly as a model for characters in his novels, which were novels of ideas, ideas which poured torrentially and not always coherently from them. Shils would be of interest simply for these biographical reasons, as a representative figure of the mid-twentieth century whose life and personal relations with such important contemporaries as Hans J. Morgenthau, Raymond Aron, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Leo Szilard revealed a great deal about the intellectual context of the time. This source of interest would increase if we include his prominent colleagues on the Committee on Social Thought, which at various times included Michael Polanyi, Hannah Arendt, Allan Bloom, Mircea Eliade, François Furet, Friedrich Hayek, Leszek Kolakowski, Paul Ricoeur, and Stephen Toulmin, several of whom were recruited by Shils himself. Such lists of relationships could be extended by including his teaching. In his early career he was active in the College of the University of Chicago, especially the famous course known as Soc Sci II, through which passed not only students who made

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academic careers but a large number of teachers who became, or were already, prominent. His own biography, however, can only be briefly outlined here, and the issue of his relationships can only be hinted at. He was born in Massachusetts in 1910 to a family of Russian Jews, but raised and educated in Philadelphia where his father was in the cigar-making business, and sufficiently prosperous to send his son to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League School with a long history, where he studied French Literature and read widely, including unsystematic and untutored reading in the social sciences. Upon graduation in the depths of the Depression, he went to Chicago, where he worked as a social worker in the ghetto, where he learned a great deal, he said, from his ‘clients’, who impressed him with their ‘character, moral steadfastness, and good humour’ (2006a: 40), and attended lectures in sociology at the University of Chicago, including the last seminar of Robert E. Park. He was soon recognized as an unusual talent by Louis Wirth, then the young star and hope of the department, and recruited to a project on German sociological theory. He was also noticed by the young and charismatic President of the University, Robert Maynard Hutchins, who was committed to a broad liberal arts education for undergraduates, and by Frank H. Knight, an economist of great stature who had produced the first English translation of Weber and ran a seminar on Weber which Shils attended. Embedded in this rich milieu, Shils flourished, and was put to use on projects important to his mentors, which included working on translations for students of key texts of Weber and the translation of Karl Mannheim’s most important works in English, Ideology and Utopia ([1929] 1936) and Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction ([1929] 1940), among other works. He was a cosmopolitan and admirer of European thinking before arriving at Chicago, where he encountered European intellectuals in the flesh, including the Weber interpreter Alexander von Schelting, and at Chicago he read even more widely: an idiosyncratic mix of Georges Sorel, Germans like Tönnies, Rudolph Otto, and such works as Hendrik De Man’s Psychology of Socialism. His place in this world was precarious, however. He was not on course for a Ph.D. or a regular appointment before 1940, when he proposed completing a dissertation and entering the academic job market – an attempt interrupted by a falling-out with Louis Wirth over a comment reported to Wirth which led, perhaps fortuitously, to his exclusion from the Department of Sociology for nearly two decades. He was not without supporters, including Robert Hutchins, the President of the University. He played an important role in the ‘College’ – the undergraduate part of the university, which was largely independent of the departments, and was a special interest of Hutchins. But Shils did not have a secure role. The Second World

introduction 3 War changed his fortunes. He worked in London for the American wartime government, in the ‘Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service’ headed by his friend Hans Speier, interviewing captured Germans and others. The Washington Office eagerly awaited the Wednesday arrival of ‘the Shils cable’ on German morale (Sills, 1981). The interviews became the basis for important post-war publications on the importance of primary group relations in the military. Shils was not alone in this kind of war work: the Allied intelligence services had recruited a large number of intellectuals and intellectual exiles centred on London, and many other exiled intellectuals were attached as advisers to governments in exile that had made London their headquarters. It was here that he became an Anglophile, and admirer of the cultural commentary of T. S. Eliot. In London he connected to Karl Mannheim, to Michael Polanyi at Manchester, to the faculty at the London School of Economics (LSE), and extended his personal network of European thinkers. At the end of the war he was 35 years old, with no advanced degree, a position listed as ‘Associate Professor of Sociology’ in the College or undergraduate part of the University of Chicago and ‘Chairman’ of the Soc Sci III course, a list of important translations but few publications of his own, an unusual collection of powerful patrons, including Knight and Hutchins, and a friendship with Talcott Parsons, who had himself used the war to consolidate a position of power at Harvard. In 1946, he secured an associate professor appointment at the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago, which was just consolidating, and arranged to be appointed at the same time to the LSE, beginning a lifelong pattern of dividing his year between Chicago and the UK. Always a voracious reader, he was now a master of Weber, engaged in projects to publish revised forms of the student translations he had worked on, and invited by Parsons to contribute to his well-funded Carnegie project of consolidating the theoretical concepts of the social sciences (Isaac, 2010). Hutchins had him included on a committee to discuss the regulation of atomic weapons, which involved him with physicists and the atomic scientists’ movement. At the LSE, he encountered the students who had come from the British colonies, and were to become the agents of decolonization. These laid the roots of his future development as a thinker. He had always been fascinated by extremist political movements, and in the late 1940s produced a manuscript which was never published. It became the basis for some of his deepest reflections on society, as well as to a consequential encounter, of a kind that was to become typical for him, with the Frankfurt School. He had been asked to contribute a chapter to a book on The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950) in a book series on methodology that critically examined major research projects.

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Basing his comments on his own empirical work, he pointed out the ideological agenda and bias of the study in a long and brutal critique: the effect was to convince Adorno to return to Germany (Gerhardt, 2002: 18–19). Shils was to transform his earlier unpublished manuscript into The Torment of Secrecy (1956), a book which addressed deep problems of democracy and pluralism, which scarcely resembled anything in the professionalizing sociology of the time, and had no impact on it, but was recognized in wider circles. Shils’ relationship with Parsons had more complex consequences. The topic on which they worked together, the action frame of reference, was never taken up again by Shils, and the result of the collaboration was typically Parsonsian. But it raised Shils’ profile, both nationally within sociology, and at Chicago, which at the time of Wirth’s premature death was struggling with the realization that it was being outstripped by Harvard and Columbia. Shils now became more attractive to a department that had no ‘theory’ person – a title previously claimed by Wirth, who never delivered on it. But it was still some time before Shils became formally affiliated with the department. He was, however, involved in some of the large grants that came to the university, notably a project on decolonization, which operated under the heading ‘New Nations’, and which involved such Parsons’ students as Clifford Geertz, who absorbed some of Shils’ concerns, such as the charisma of central institutions. This was the theme of Shils’ and Michael Young’s important ‘The Meaning of the Coronation’ ([1953] 1975a), a work which still resonates and produces controversy today, and marked him out as a ‘consensus’ theorist who claimed that underlying the overt conflicts in society there was a more or less common core of values and a sense of what was commonly held to be sacred. Norman Birnbaum’s attack on this essay (1955) only enhanced its stature, but also foreshadowed the conflict versus consensus disputes that divided sociology in the 1960s. Contention became a theme of Shils’ life, and he did not shy away from literary quarrels, typically, as with Adorno, with prominent intellectuals on the Left, such as Dwight MacDonald and later, C. Wright Mills. In this he was unlike his contemporary sociologists: Merton and Parsons worked relentlessly against Mills, for example, but only behind the scenes. Shils’ taste for controversy of this kind never abated, and became part of his persona. The 1950s was a decade of feverish activity for Shils. He was involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter, the Atomic Scientists Movement, and increasingly with the Third World, notably India and Indian intellectuals. But it was also the decade in which he constructed

introduction 5 the synthesis that made up his picture of society. He took from Charles H. Cooley the idea of the centrality of primary group relations to everyday experience, and from Rudolph Otto the idea of the sacred, which he used to explain the social bond that defined the larger society, and added to this the notion of civil ties, the relations that defined the rules of the game of political life, and argued, from his experience with the Wehrmacht, that people were differentially sensitive to the sacred core of society, but that their primary group relations to those who were most sensitive provided the glue which tied those who were less sensitive to the centre of society, to the charisma of central institutions, in this indirect way. One could discern the background of these ideas in the classics of sociology, including Tönnies and Weber, and some affinity with Parsons, but the result was Shils’ own. Yet he never produced the great work laying out this picture of society, though he planned to do so. And as his thought developed, it veered ever farther from conventional sociology. Shils had participated in the enthusiasm for the prospects of behavioural science and sociology in the late 1940s, as shown by the first version of his essay ‘The Calling of Sociology’ (1961a). Disillusion soon set in, however, and Shils’ response was to further develop the thought that sociology was a form of the self-understanding of society and an aid to the development of human autonomy. This went against the grain of conventional sociology, dominated even at Chicago by the Merton–Lazarsfeld model of quantification, as represented by such Columbia products as Peter Blau and Peter Rossi, as well as against the increasingly vocal Left in sociology. The 1960s proved to be the moment for the ascendance of both currents; the kind of sociological thinking practiced by Shils, though it did not vanish, was eclipsed. Shils himself, however, had sufficient status, and sufficient freedom from the discipline, to pursue his own ideas, and did. He worked on the puzzle of the antinomian tendencies of intellectuals, which he interpreted as being both oriented to central institutions and alienated from the grittier reality of the business and politics that were conducted in them. He extended his examination of the dilemmas of the modernizing intellectual. And he turned more systematically to the problems of the university and science, leading to his founding of the journal Minerva. When the student movement of the late 1960s produced a crisis of university governance, he was involved as an adviser to the President of the University of Chicago, where he counselled enforcing the rules but leniency in sanctions against students. Shils’ concerns were not fashionable topics, neither in the narrowing discipline of sociology in the United States, nor in the larger intellectual world he had inhabited in the 1960s. Nevertheless they allowed him to

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develop a more elaborate and distinctive perspective. It is this perspective and its intellectual sources that is the focus of several of the essays in this book, and it is the part of Shils that is on the one hand most central to his thought and on the other less well known, obscured by the prominence of the internal controversies in the sociology of the time. Sociology went into crisis in the 1970s, and Shils’ relation to it became even more tenuous. The very revealing introductions to the collections of his essays published in the mid-1970s have a valedictory character, and from this point he leaves sociology behind. He became, instead, a humanist with sociological and social theoretical sensitivities. The book written in that decade (Tradition 1981a), concerned with literature and art and the transmission of thought (and discussed by Lenore Ealy in Chapter 3 in this book), was the product of the period. Yet he also wrote on the divisions in contemporary civil society, which he thought of as representing antinomies in the liberal tradition itself. Shils had long been relied on by others for the purpose of articulating basic concepts in areas of intellectual contestation. His formulation of the concept of modernity in relation to ‘development’, for example, was a touchstone. He was now called upon to do the same thing for concepts like civility and the academic ethic. His Jefferson lecture, ‘Render unto Caesar: Government, Society, and the Universities in their Reciprocal Rights and Duties’ (1979), reflected a lifetime of concern over the protection of the autonomy of intellectual life. It placed him where he wished to be – with the likes of Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Gerald Holton, Robert Penn Warren, Bernard Knox, Bernard Lewis, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and such friends and colleagues on the Committee on Social Thought (which supplied an astonishing proportion of the lecturers) as Saul Bellow, Leszek Kolakowski, Stephen Toulmin, and Leon Kass. This is the barest of outlines of a long career. But his life itself has important omissions. There was never the great book that Chicago professors aspired to write, or that his peers, such as Talcott Parsons, Michael Polanyi, and Michael Oakeshott wrote. There was no easily summarizable ‘position’ that he defended. Unlike Parsons or Merton and Lazarsfeld, he did not cultivate students, but rather intimidated them with his expectations. He was never borne into prominence by the Zeitgeist, as his fellow Jefferson lecturer Erik Erikson was. He was better known among sociologists for his brief collaboration with Parsons than for his own writings. His political ideology was opaque even to those who had known him for decades. His reputation was such that his judgements of academics, which were often very harsh, carried weight far beyond his own universities. But these judgements were largely free of the usual obsessions with disciplinary status, reflected his assessment of the intellectual seriousness of the

introduction 7 work, and were often idiosyncratic. All of this adds up to a mystery, which a further biographical examination would only deepen. The paradoxical Shils Shils’ interests and commitments were so diverse that he escapes categorization, yet he lived the life of the mind in a strikingly coherent manner, pursuing, as he put it, certain ideas throughout his long career. An academic to the core, his greatest admiration was given to friends such as Arnaldo Momigliano, whom he cared for at the end of his life. Momigliano was a profoundly knowledgeable historian of the ancient world but at the same time a respectful author of highly personal and insightful biographies of his intellectual predecessors. Shils, similarly, wrote extensive personal appreciations of other scholars. Shils’ discussions of what he called the Academic Ethic (1997c) were accounts of the purest kind of academia, free from the attractions of power and of public acclaim, or even of the practical constraints of the large public university. Yet in spite of the rarefied academic milieu in which he thrived, and in spite of his highly abstract interests in society as a topic, as well as his antipathy for what would become the engaged scholarship that began to flourish in his later years, Shils was himself engaged. The war work produced permanent bonds that distinguished those who had the experience from the academics that did not share it, and followed them all their lives. The war, if not transformative for Shils, was a crucial experience. Speier returned to the New School after the war and found it slow and boring. At the RAND Corporation deadlines were real and the pace was faster, continuing both the urgency of wartime and its practical orientation. Other people whom Shils respected, such as Nathan Leites, also went to RAND. Shils perhaps shared Speier’s sense that the university was not enough. After the war he continued to work on projects occasionally for RAND. And perhaps this desire for active engagement led to his own engagements. As we have noted, he was engaged intellectually with the ‘public intellectuals’ of his time, such as Dwight MacDonald, whose attacks on mass culture in the name of high culture he rejected. The Atomic Scientists Movement was one of the great policy and intellectual struggles of his day; the other was the struggle against international Communism, which his work with Encounter and the Congress for Cultural Freedom furthered. These were activities of greater intensity and significance than the usual work of an academic. Shils had an equally paradoxical relation to academic hierarchy. He did not climb academic ladders or particularly concern himself with the professional pecking order of his nominal discipline of sociology. He ridiculed

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his colleagues who were obsessed with their ranking in the discipline, implying that both the concern and the discipline were unworthy. Yet he spent his life at the top of the academic pyramid, at the University of Chicago, Cambridge, and the LSE, and in association with elite organizations. And his attitudes toward the scholarly work of others, as well as toward universities slightly below these on the conventional academic pecking order, were largely dismissive. The greatness of the University of Chicago, he thought, consisted in the greatness of a few individuals. Yet he believed in the greatness of the great universities, even as he regarded many of the faculty of these universities as insignificant drones. His relation to his nominal field of sociology is equally puzzling. The impression that he was a junior Parsonsian had a basis: he was friends with Parsons from the 1930s, in large part as a result of their common interest in Max Weber, and the relationship resulted in a brief but intense collaboration on the section on norms and values of Toward a General Theory of Action (Parsons and Shils, 1951, Part II: 47–143), one of the few enduring parts of the Parsonsian project. But Shils rejected and ignored the theorizing that occupied the rest of Parsons’ career, the elaboration of the boxes that made up the AGIL scheme. Although Shils was concerned with the question of what ties bound people together in societal arrangements, he was not a consensus theorist in Parsons’ sense. While Parsons, in the midst of the student uprisings of the late 1960s, was writing, in The American University (Parsons and Platt, 1973), about the consensual American value system, Shils came to the opposite conclusion: that the American consensus had broken down, perhaps irretrievably, as evidenced by the violent hostility of many of his colleagues to Richard Nixon before he was felled by the Watergate scandal. Despite being, in his later years, a member of the Department of Sociology at Chicago in addition to his longstanding appointment to the Comm­ ittee on Social Thought, and despite the Department’s recognition of his importance – a recognition expressed in the publication of his key sociological essays in a local student edition – Shils’ interests and writing, including his writing on sociological topics, had little to do with the professional literature of sociology, or with ‘sociological theory’ as it was practised by his relatively near contemporaries. He was absent from the theory textbooks. Until the 1970s, ‘theory’ was dominated by students of Merton and Parsons; afterwards by various forms of self-described ‘positivism’ and ‘interpretivism’. Shils did nothing to intervene in the disputes over these topics. The theoretical topics he addressed later in life had no resonance in these controversies and owed nothing to them. He continued to think about and articulate what he took to be the great themes of social life: centre and periphery, charisma, tradition, and the variety of social

introduction 9 ties, including the civil, the sacred, and what he called the primordial. Although his 1981 book Tradition was widely cited, it was ignored in the sociological community, with very few exceptions. He was honoured as a member of this community, even to the extent of having an award of the Section on Theory of the American Sociological Association named after him, while transcending it completely. The same paradoxical insider–outsider pattern marked his early career. His undergraduate degree was in Literature, from the University of Pennsylvania, where he had been a town student. His first courses at the University of Chicago, taken at 8.00am or 8.00pm, were with Herbert Blumer and Louis Wirth. By his own account, he did not intend to become a professional sociologist. Like others of his age in the Great Depression, merely having a job was aspiration enough. And he was able to imagine a life of the mind outside the life of a professional academic. He was brought in by Wirth, who valued him for his facility with German. This skill turned out to be formative, in that it opened many doors for him, but not for the usual reason: he did not, as Howard Becker, who had graduated from Chicago a few years earlier, and as Parsons did, begin to think in a Germanic manner. But the doors it opened were doors that led away from the very conventional sociology of his graduate student peers in sociology at Chicago. Many of these doors were outside sociology itself. Although he attended the last seminar given at the University of Chicago by Robert E. Park, whom he greatly admired and thought of as the heart and brains of the Chicago School, perhaps the crucial part of his education came from a non-sociologist, the economist Frank H. Knight. Knight was an admirer of Weber, and conducted a seminar, attended also by Milton and Rose Friedman, on Weber. The other big door it opened was to Karl Mannheim, whose major works Shils was to translate. Yet Shils did not become a Mannheimian. Nor, despite his reverence for Weber, and extensive use of his ideas, did he become a Weberian. Indeed, what he characterizes as his guiding ideas, collective self-consciousness and the sacralized character of society, are not only absent from Weber but absent in principle, given Weber’s methodological precepts. They are, however, strongly reminiscent of Émile Durkheim, for whom religion was the worship of society displaced onto more readily intelligible objects, such as God and Totems. Yet Shils rarely mentions Durkheim and claimed to have obtained little from him, and interpreted these kinds of objects in terms of charisma, which in turn he interpreted in terms of Otto’s Idea of the Holy ([1917] 1923). Shils’ marginality to conventional sociology was reinforced by his teaching. He did not teach the topical courses that conventional sociologists normally taught. He had no ‘speciality’ in the usual sense. Yet in the

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post-war period he was employed for half the year at the LSE, where he represented and promoted ‘American’ sociology, including empirical sociology and the Chicago School. At the University of Chicago, he was not a member of the Department and was for almost two decades estranged and excluded from it. Most of his career, and time, was spent in the Committee on Social Thought, among scholars from different backgrounds who taught, for the most part, seminars on classic texts in philosophy and literature, to students preparing for exams on these texts. Shils’ closest intellectual ally was Michael Polanyi, the physical chemist turned social scientist and philosopher of science, whose views of science he shared, and promoted through Minerva. They shared much else as well. But Polanyi was a philosopher in his interests and approach. Shils, although he promoted the teaching of the great figures in the history of philosophy, was neither inclined towards professional philosophy nor did he approach these thinkers philosophically. In recalling his early work with Wirth, he commented that Wirth ‘had a faiblesse for presuppositions’ (2006a: 41). Shils had no such weakness. Where Polanyi wrote extensively on tradition, treating it as a surrogate for philosophical foundations, and at a time when Hans-Georg Gadamer was making tradition into a core philosophical concept, Shils wrote about tradition with a resolutely empirical, classificatory, eye, as a fox rather than a hedgehog, undermining any reductive analysis of the phenomenon by his painstaking differentiation of types and forms of tradition. Shils was free of scientism, especially of the sort that gripped the discipline of sociology in the post-war years. Yet science itself engaged him as a topic of sociological interest, and, as a result of his appointment to a University of Chicago Committee following the use of the A-Bomb, he developed relations with important scientists, such as Leo Szilard, of whom he wrote a remembrance (Shils, 1964). But he was motivated by an entirely different set of concerns than the Mertonian paradigm that dominated American sociology of science, which was fixated on the stratification system of science and its efficiency, as measured in citation counts. Shils’ concerns were about science policy and security policy, and about the integrity of scientific institutions, especially their autonomy. These had also been the concerns of a cohesive generation of anti-Marxist science warriors, with whom he was in close contact, and who formed the core of the contributors to Minerva. But as this generation faded, he engaged with the new sociology of scientific knowledge, even taking the measure of such novelties as ‘The Strong Programme’. The inner Shils is equally paradoxical. He lived his life in contact, and friendship, with intellectuals of the highest calibre, and revelled in academic gossip and in often harsh evaluations of prominent intellectuals. His

introduction 11 attitudes about academic hierarchy were elitist. He travelled in the highest circles and made no apologies for it, looking down on his more ordinary colleagues, even the famous ones. But he was also fascinated by ordinary people, and cherished his relationships with families who ran Chinese restaurants, bookshop proprietors, and people of the city. He encouraged Mitchell Duneier’s study of the customers of the Valois restaurant in Hyde Park, in Chicago, and their social relations, which were focused on honour and mutual respect – despite the fact that the people being studied were members of the underclass (Duneier, 1992), the descendants, perhaps, of his clients in the 1930s. He was no fan of academic feminism, but he was a strong supporter of women he thought meritorious, facilitated their appointment to the University of Chicago long before such appointments became an issue, and had a close friendship with Carmen Blacker. Late in life he edited a collection of biographical studies of Cambridge’s women scholars with her, in part to recapture the world of scholarly achievement that was ignored by younger feminists (Shils and Blacker, eds, 1996). There are other, more fundamental, puzzles. Shils was a literary intellectual. He revelled in his relationship to writers, and enjoyed his service with The American Scholar; in addition to Saul Bellow, he was a friend to such major writers as Amit Chaudhiri, Joseph Epstein, and Dan Jacobson. He loved literature, and recommended his favourites, such as Dickens’ Dombey and Son (1848). He hobnobbed with the Great and the Good during his time in the UK half of every year, and with convivial but also distinguished friends in Chicago, none of whom were ‘sociologists’. Yet he never disowned his identity as a sociologist. One does not think of Shils as a pedagogue, but in fact he taught continuously and took pride in his teaching. He came to be employed by the ‘College’ of the University of Chicago, and, as noted, much of his effort went into the famous second-year social science course in the general education curriculum, Soc Sci II, which introduced undergraduate thinkers to the great philosophers of the social world (Orlinsky, 1992: 119). His own recollections were these: I began to get my hands on the course in the summer of 1939 when I recast it pretty completely. It really was an extraordinary course. I need not go into all my ambitions in the construction of that course. Of course, the students were expected to read Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Dicey’s Law and Opinion, John Dickinson, Hobbes, Locke, and a number of other important and difficult writers. But it was Max Weber, above all, whom I imposed on those poor suffering students.1

These were topics that he continually returned to in his seminars late in life as well, and taught routinely as part of the Committee on Social

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Thought. He was also an avid provider of National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars, but resisted entreaties to structure his summer seminars on more trendy lines. He was intensely curious about the students who attended his seminars, and about the biographies of the scholars he read. He was especially kind to the foreign visitors who made the pilgrimage to Chicago to see him, or enrolled for the Summer Quarter, and, perhaps surprisingly, to younger scholars in whom he saw promise, regardless of their academic pedigree. Yet none of this produced a following. The figures influenced by Shils, such as S. N. Eisenstadt, were not identifiably ‘Shilsian’. There was no Shils school, nor did Shils make any effort to promote one. As an author, he was also unconventional. He wrote a great deal that he never published, and was perennially dissatisfied with his own writings and theoretical formulations. Books that were announced never appeared. Although he never wrote the great book that would tie his ideas together, in his writings in the early 1950s there are indications that he intended to. Yet he was around, and friends with, prodigiously productive scholars and novelists who had done the great book themselves, notably Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations, in which Shils is thanked in the acknowledgements ([1948] 1978: ix), which became the standard textbook in International Relations. But this was not a matter of an inability to write: indeed, he spent endless hours editing, in his signature green ink, the writings of contributors to Minerva, in order that they appear in print in the best light. The failure to write the great work which pulled it all together was not the result of any lack of coherence in the picture that he had built up of society, in which people lived in and were most closely affected by their primary group relations, in which some members of these groups were especially sensitive to and oriented to ‘the centre’, and its institutions, which had a charismatic character, and to ties civil, sacred, and primordial related to these institutions and collective identities that went beyond the primary group, all resting on a bed of tradition. These ideas ran throughout his writings. But he was never satisfied with his formulation of the connections between the parts of the picture, or with the concept of collectivity that was central to it. In a note in his papers on the origins of norms he writes that there are two sources, ‘the need or desire of human beings to act in accordance with a rule of justification or legitimacy’, rules and justifications which ‘are accepted because human beings cannot live entirely as self-sufficient organisms, quite apart from the need for support by collaboration and exchange. Human beings need to be part of a transcendental order. The transcendental orders are “society”, and the cosmic

introduction 13 order, or the divine order. It is not just order. It is sacredness.’2 The second source, which supplies the content that meets this need, is membership in the collectivity. It is not just that the individual coming into a collectivity, accepts the norms which are currently accepted and affirmed by existing members. My view is that membership generates norms because it creates a collective self within the individual. Participation in a collective image means that that image becomes a part of the individual—just as the individual becomes part of the collectivity and participates in its image which we might for the time being call the collective self. By the act of participation, the collective self comes into existence. 3

But he admits to himself that ‘This is questionable’, and adds, ‘Think more on it. Perhaps I need to get rid of the term “collective self”. But by what can it be replaced?’4 These and other questions Shils continued to struggle with, without ultimately resolving them to his own satisfaction. This makes his life project seem like a failure. But this is perhaps the wrong perspective, and in any case fails to capture what made Shils an important thinker. To reduce Shils to a formula goes against his own way of thinking, which was to begin with the phenomenon of social life, and especially the nature of our bonds to one another and to the shared transcendental. What Shils intuited about these bonds was that they were richly differential – that such things as primary relations, transcendental relations, deference, loyalty, civility, and what he called primordial relations – varied between societies and changed in historical societies, often, as with deference, over the longue durée, and between individuals, who were differentially sensitive to the various and different social relations they were a part of. These relations, however elusive, were for him the real stuff of ‘society’ which together composed the social order and differentiated one social order from another. And this way of thinking about society was for him the alternative to what he called ‘Hobbism’, the great rival conception of society to which he was opposed in its many derivations. The fact that an insight like this, however rich, is ultimately difficult to reduce to a formulaic ‘theory’ does not count against its validity or truth: to be elusive is not to be false. It only counts against its fashionability in an academic environment in which this is not rewarded. It was Shils’ great good fortune to be in institutions, and in a moment in history, where it was possible for him to pursue these ideas, and to pursue them in a variety of social groups, from German prisoners of war to American nativism to Indian intellectuals. It is in this sense that the biography is the man: that this particular body of work, this way of pursuing these insights, was made possible by the situations into which he was thrown by history and of the

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unusual opportunities that were presented to him, and of the way in which he responded to these opportunities. Shils’ contemporaries and rivals, such as Merton and Parsons, present a much more straightforward picture; their goals were clear; their institutional settings were simpler and less diverse; their relation to the great historical events of their time was less engaged and more distant; they had followers who applied and explained their views and were in turn supported by them in their academic careers; and they believed in the questions they had asked and the answers they had given. They did not, to use the language of Oakeshott, spend their lives pursuing intimations. In contrast, Shils’ interpreters, as we will see, struggled to identify his viewpoint and significance, and normally have relied on aspects of his context – who he read and who he was responding to – in order to understand his larger purposes. But the fact of his voracious reading made even this difficult. The question of biography The difficulty of placing Shils into conventional academic categories and relations has meant that Shils has been exposed to forms of reductive analysis, such as treating him as a follower of Parsons or as a Cold War ideologue. The latter charge requires a deeper analysis. When people say of Shils that the work cannot be separated from the biography, they have usually meant that Shils should be relegated to the status of ‘Cold War intellectual’.5 This is an issue that needs to be frankly addressed. As with many if not most of the so-called Cold War intellectuals, Shils’ attitudes derived from the experiences of the 1930s, and in his own case and those of the émigrés with whom he was in close contact, from the lessons of the Weimar Republic, both as filtered through the German writers with whom he was engaged and from the émigrés themselves, who were typically, like his friend Hans Speier, on the Left but closer to the Social Democratic Party, and who were sophisticated in distinguishing strands of Left political thinking. But Shils was also directly engaged with the radical movements of his own time in Chicago, whose meetings he attended and in whose character and ideologies he took a special interest. His long-time friend Herbert Goldhamer provides a telling window into Shils at this time, describing his interactions with Communist students. I was a witness to many conversations and arguments—in our office, on campus, at meals, and in the various common-rooms—in which Mr. Shils attacked the Communist groups both at the University and on the general national and international political scene. There were dozens of these instances. He used to argue with them over the Marxist theory of historical causation, which he said was naive and incorrect; over the theory that the

introduction 15 state would ‘wither away’ after the proletariat took power, which he said was false theory and disproved by events in Russia; and so on. He used to scold them for swallowing the Communist ‘line’ about the Moscow purge trials, famines in the Ukraine, etc. Mr. Shils, as a matter of fact, was regarded by some radical students as a ‘social fascist’; he made them particularly uncomfortable because he knew more about the history of their own political movement than they did themselves. This, however, did not prevent the less fully ‘radicalized’ students from having a high regard for Mr. Shils, and his influence among them was considerable.6

In later life, Shils never relented in his hostility to apologists for Stalinism or, for that matter, to the intellectual supporters of Nazism, frequently remonstrating with friends who had made comments in print which were not, he thought, hard enough on Carl Schmitt or Martin Heidegger, whose acts of cruelty he thought people needed to be constantly reminded of. The 1930s were a harsh school in political reality, a reality with which the émigrés Shils interacted with, such as Speier, were well acquainted. ‘Socialism’, the stated aim of the social democratic parties of the Continent in the inter-war years, was an ideal held before the working classes that was without practical content. When the Socialists came to power, in Germany and later under Léon Blum in France, they did not implement ‘socialism’ – in part because they were afraid of provoking civil war, but also because there was no practical programme that would achieve the promise of socialist brotherhood and plenty on which their support traded. The practical programme that was much discussed at the time was ‘planning’. This was a concept common to the Communists, the Nazis and Fascists, John Dewey, and the Roosevelt administration, and was a centrepiece of Mannheim’s Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, on which Shils sceptically commented (Mannheim, [1929] 1940; Shils, 1941). It was also a major topic of discussion among economists at the University of Chicago, including Shils’ mentor Frank H. Knight, and Oskar Lange, who was on the Faculty during the late 1930s and during the war, and who made the theoretical case that a socialist economy based on central planning could be as efficient as a capitalist one if it incorporated feedback by responding to shortages and surpluses by changing prices. The other viable alternative was Soviet-style Communism. The Western admirers of the Soviet Union were legion. But the organizational tactics, with secret cells and membership, and the party-line mentality of the Communists left the intellectual supporters of social democratic parties cold, and the actual experiences, especially of European intellectuals, of communist parties immunized them from the temptation. Continental Europe had only a weak ‘liberal’ tradition, at least in the realm of popular politics: among intellectuals it was somewhat different, in that many of

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the émigrés, especially among the economists, had come to embrace liberal democracy as a political form. But they did not do this as, so to say, native speakers. Nor did they identify with the Anglo-American tradition represented by such figures as Locke and the Federalists, which was conventionally presented as ‘political theory’ in political science departments. They were inclined instead to construct liberalism as a kind of antisocialism. Works like Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) and his The CounterRevolution of Science ([1952] 1979) were sophisticated deconstructions of the intellectual origins of socialism. After the war Joseph Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), offered a realist, Weberian approach to liberal democracy, as did Hans Kelsen and later Hans Morgenthau, Kelsen’s student and Shils’ friend. To the extent that Shils was a political thinker at the beginning of the Cold War, this was his milieu. But there were changes in the immediate post-war period from the discussions of the 1930s. One involved the emergence of the welfare state in Europe. In the UK, an alternative was devised in the post-war period, under the influence of R. H. Tawney, of supplying government services, notably in health care. Shils admired Tawney. Tawney realized that redistribution was never a serious option: there was simply not enough to redistribute to make an appreciable difference in people’s lives. The welfare state, in short, was a viable alternative, which Shils embraced. During the same period he was exposed to Oakeshott, whose classic essay ‘Rationalism in Politics’ appeared in 1947 ([1947] 1962), and to Michael Polanyi, with whom he developed an immediate rapport. The issue of ideology was central to Oakeshott. And the relentless advance of Stalinist control of the nations of Eastern Europe was not only in the news but the subject, as Tony Judt has shown (2005), of extraordinarily disingenuous apologetics by prominent intellectuals. The ‘liberal’ response to the successes of the Soviet Union and its Western sympathizers was an evolved form of the response to Nazism, but it was inchoate and diverse, making bedfellows of such very different thinkers as Karl Popper and Raymond Aron. One can perhaps date Shils’ public emergence from these conflicting currents from his methodological critique, ‘Authoritarianism “Right” and “Left”’ (1954a), of The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950); Shils had been, during the late 1940s, attentive to the Weimar-conditioned concerns over the proto-Fascism of the American Right, which Shils identified as ‘nativism’, and which had culminated in The Authoritarian Personality. He went so far as to write a manuscript on American nativist movements, describing their anti-Semitism and hostility to intellectuals. He even used the term ‘authoritarian personalities’ in this manuscript to

introduction 17 describe the followers of these movements.7 But he concluded that they were not a threat, because of the organizational incapacities of these movements, incapacities that resulted in part from the fact of the personalities of their followers. This line of thought reappeared in print in his critique (1954a) of The Authoritarian Personality, where Shils made two major points. The first was that psychological tendencies did not, as the authors of The Authoritarian Personality seemed to assume, automatically translate into political action, as the failure of nativist movements to gain ground in the United States indicated. The second was that the authors ignored not only the phenomenon of Left authoritarianism, but ignored it in the evidence they themselves presented. With this text Shils took a stand against a certain kind of misuse of social science to advance an ideological agenda. It was during this period that Shils became actively involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Criticism of this involvement by Shils, and by extension other academics who were involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom or with publications like Encounter, is rarely articulated in the form of an argument. The basic thinking behind the criticism derives from the kind of sociology of knowledge that Shils himself discarded as inadequate – the notion that people’s ideas are determined by their material interests, and the further notion that intellectuals could be bought, or induced to develop ideas that served the interests of their paymasters. The application of this idea in the specific case of the Cold War is that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), sometimes through Foundations such as the Ford Foundation, sometimes through secret subventions, supported activities favourable to ‘American interests’, including the Congress for Cultural Freedom (Simkin, [1997] 2015; Saunders, 1999) and Encounter. In the larger historical picture, these activities could be and have been represented as part of a phenomenon of ‘Cold War’ science and culture. In some cases, the general phenomenon of ‘Cold War’ thinking was alleged to transform the relevant academic discipline, diverting it from its normal course towards a narrow, technical, and uncritical dominant style that excluded important alternatives (see McCumber, 2001). Implicit in these arguments is the idea that there is a deep moral wrong that goes beyond the mere fact of subterfuge in the mechanism of funding which derives from the aims of the funding itself, namely that the funding was designed to support the nefarious enterprise of American Imperialism, the suppression of the intellectual discourse necessary for the radical transformation of society, and artificially and therefore illegitimately enshrining certain academic views favourable to the interests in question and excluding others.

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There is of course another side to this story. The period of the late 1940s and early 1950s was in fact a time of struggle over the fate and future of liberal democracy in Europe. Intellectuals played a role in these struggles. In one respect they were very unequal. The Communists were better organized and funded, and secretive about party membership and discipline. The Soviet Union had sponsored the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace in Wrocław, Poland in 1948, which attacked the West and its culture, as well as its liberal democratic politics. Communist parties all over the world had the allegiance of many intellectuals, who followed, or hewed close to, the party line, which was to support the Soviet Union and its worldwide efforts to expand its influence and power through local communist parties. The opposition was not so well organized. But it did have some institutions, like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was the successor to the Committee for Cultural Freedom established in the 1930s to speak out for intellectual freedom against Nazism and Communism. The new body was internationalized, with funding from various sources which turned out in the end to have come from the CIA. When this funding was revealed much later, in 1966, the organization collapsed, though its flagship journal, Encounter, survived for some time. Some of the editors disclaimed any knowledge of CIA funding and claimed to be appalled by it. Shils, who was on the editorial board and contributed 22 articles over the years, was not among them, and presumably regarded them as naïfs. Encounter was a journal of culture, which addressed politics to some extent but was not an advocacy journal. But it did include, among its glittering list of contributors, a number of heavyweight intellectual defenders of liberal democracy, and did not avoid discussions, usually highly intellectualized, of political matters. It was also not critical of American foreign policy, for the most part, which is one of the charges against it. There is no mystery about Shils’ relation to this group: he was an active member and shared their views and many of their formative experiences. The question is whether this in some way discredits him, or indeed the enterprise of Encounter itself. This is a question that transcends the facts of the case: it comes down to the question of whether the struggle against Communism was justified, and whether the means employed, which involved deception about funding, were justified. But there is a more basic question of whether the actual scholarship involved was somehow distorted or subservient, or complicit with, anything nefarious or unjustified. Much of the secondary literature as it relates to Shils involves modernization, and this is a place where the issues can be briefly addressed. Shils was involved with development theory in the 1950s and into the 1960s, as part of the New Nations project funded by the Ford Foundation, which

introduction 19 produced a ‘Committee’ at the University of Chicago that included some of the younger shining lights of the period. As a consequence he was treated as a ‘development’ theorist and provided some of the pithiest articulations of the idea of ‘development’. Yet he was a student and admirer of indigenous intellectuals in India and Africa, wrote extensively on Indian and developing world intellectuals and their dilemmas, and thus he comes close to being a precursor to the concerns of theories of postcolonialism. Shils was genuinely sympathetic with these intellectuals and their dilemmas, had a nuanced understanding of their intellectual motivations, and a respect for the traditions they sought to preserve, a respect that was in conflict with the ‘modernization’ discourse to which he was a major contributor. He prefigured but surpassed what was to become postcolonial theory, by stressing not merely the pull of the metropole (what Shils called the ‘centre’) but the psychic and intellectual conflicts intrinsic to the status of the ‘postcolonial’ intellectual, a point to which we will return. Today the paradigm of development which flourished in the 1950s and 1960s is being studied historically, both under the influence of the concept of ‘Cold War Science’ and in light of postcolonial theory. Shils has been grouped in these writings with enthusiasts of developmentalism like W.W. Rostow. Yet Shils was anything but a simple developmentalist. Although he was called upon, and delivered, definitions of ‘modernization’, he rooted these definitions in a sense of what the term meant to the modernizers of the Third World. This was something he could do because he was heavily engaged on a personal level with ‘Third World’ intellectuals, a category not readily distinguishable from politicians, as Shils himself pointed out – figures like Kwame Nkrumah (president of Ghana) had been LSE students from Shils’ own era there, and the LSE provided much of the intellectual power of the decolonizationation movements in the British colonial world. He analysed the struggles of these intellectuals sympathetically, and did not, as the terminology of the present would have it, deny them agency. Nor did he imagine them as mere enthusiasts for ‘modernity’: he understood them as engaged and committed to their own societies and traditions. The books referring to Shils’ work in this period often quote him, as he is one of the most, indeed few, quotable writers on this topic. They are part of a genre of books which attempt to construct scandals out of inferred relations between the supposed aims of donors and the commitments of the academic authors. Typically these critiques focus on the policy-related ‘ambience’ (Gendzier, 1998: 68) produced by this thinking, and imply that it was at the root of such catastrophes as the war in Vietnam and the failures of American foreign policy elsewhere in the world. Said Arjomand criticizes Shils for a passage written with Parsons, for explaining the

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process of development in terms of internal issues. ‘He purported to explain social change as caused by “deviation [from institutionalized patterns] and the imperfection of the integration of value-orientations” (Parsons and Shils, 1951: 231)’ (Arjomand, 2004: 232). Arjomand comments that ‘There is no mention of the state or planning, and no suspicion that the international system of mushrooming sovereign nation-states dominated by the two superpowers in fact constituted “the external situation of a social system” after 1945 (Parsons and Shils, 1951: 232)!’ (Arjomand, 2004: 332).8 He notes that ‘This blind spot was not repaired when Parsons turned to a less abstract and more historically grounded treatment of societal change and modernization later’ (2004: 332). As a criticism, this fits the narrative outlined above: the theory being advanced serves the interests of American Imperialism by obscuring the effects of Great Power rivalry, which are assumed to have had not only negative but determinative effects. Behind this, and necessary for it to make sense, is the vague notion that these nations, left to their own devices and free from these negative effects, would have developed a better or ‘alternative’ form of modernity unlike the American model and superior to it – perhaps through something like ‘planning’. The literature then assigns blame for this non-outcome to external sources, or complains about the negative content of the explanations of non-development, such as the focus on corruption and weak governance, as demeaning. Arjomand correctly summarizes Shils’ The Intellectuals and the Powers, by saying that Shils ‘noted the strength of primordial local and kinship ties in traditional societies militated against civil politics, especially because of “the moral structure of the independence movement” (Shils 1972a: 410)’ (Arjomand, 2004: 334), and that he also ‘affirmed that “in a pluralistic society they are not by any means incompatible with citizenship” (Shils 1972a: 410)’ (2004: 334). In short, Shils affirmed that civil ties were distinct from primordial and sacred ties, but that they could and in the relevant cases did constitute an obstacle to the development of a civil order. This should not be controversial: ethnic and religious conflicts taking the form of civil wars and even genocide have been commonplace in the states created after the Second World War. Corrupt acts by government officials motivated by family obligations have been a recurrent fact in these states. Arjomand comments on the Shilsian view of modernization that ‘The followers of Michel Foucault may read this as a program of domination through knowledge in the American Century’ (2004: 334). Arjomand argues instead for a variant of the ‘ambience’ claim: that ‘the Shils–Geertz variant of the theory of modernization [is] normative because of its treatment of modernization as the axial value-idea of

introduction 21 the new era’ (2004: 334–5). A similar argument is found in other discussions of Shils: that the theory is ambiguous between fact and normative policy advice, or the endorsement of a value and inevitable teleological end (Robin, 2001: 28–9). What would Shils have said to this? In the first place, he was typically careful to point out that the desire for modernization he is describing is that of the modernizing intellectuals of the postcolonial world themselves (Shils, 1966a: 7). The goal of the modernizing intellectuals was, in his frequently quoted phrase, ‘being Western without the onus of dependence on the West’ (1966a: 10). Modernization was ‘axial’ because they made it axial. The brunt of his account of the situation of the modernizing elites lies in the problematic of being caught between tradition and modernity – an ‘internal’ problem in one sense, but one which is necessarily bound up with the external models of modernity that the elites had to choose from. He made clear the reasons that one-party rule and dictatorships were attractive political solutions. The role of great power conflict is not absent from his discussion, but it is seen from the point of view of the modernizing elites themselves, who were attracted to the Soviet model, for reasons that included the perception that Moscow was not racially discriminatory, as well as the continuing attraction of the idea of planning (1966a: 49n1). So Shils, at least, did not ignore or suppress these topics. Whether Shils thought modernization was a good thing – a value to be embraced – is beside the point: the analysis does not depend on it, and he thought that the loss of traditions to build on was in fact a bad thing. But there is a deeper issue of interpretation here. It should be observed that embracing one side of a dispute was antithetical to his way of thinking. His style of addressing these questions was to find, so to speak, the rational kernel in each side of a dispute, and to transcend the dispute by analysing it and explaining its persistence. This was perhaps an echo of his early engagement with Mannheim, who thought of the sociology of knowledge as a way of transcending entrenched ideological conflicts. Shils, in any case, was personally sympathetic to these intellectuals and the ambiguities they were navigating because of their conflicting attachments to the metropole and to their own societies and traditions, and to their sincere desire for improving their societies and embarrassment for their failings. These ambiguities certainly included the feeling of inferiority and the perception of inferiority that Franz Fanon made central to his analysis of colonialism, and even for the rage against the colonizers Fanon articulated. But Shils did not make this rage the centrepiece of his account, as indeed it should not have been, given the actual, largely optimistic,

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standpoint of the intellectuals with whom he was engaged in the early years of decolonization. And he made the crucial point that their standpoint always involved an orientation, however hostile, to the metropole. It was when ‘development’ had disappointed that the Fanonist narrative, together with the idea of the injuries of colonialism, gained appeal as an explanation of the failures of development. The critiques of the first generation of postcolonial leaders by the practitioners of present-day ‘subaltern studies’ reflect this disappointment. They are concerned with placing blame rather than sympathetic understanding. Nevertheless, their polemics are illuminated by Shils’ Ideologikritik of the plight of the intellectual in the developing world: they reflect the very dilemma he makes central. But they take sides on this dilemma rather than analyse it, much less attempt to transcend it. Yet the ‘internal’ problem Shils focused on has proven to be fundamental, and unresolved. Today, Chinese intellect­ uals struggle with the problem of accommodating a fundamentally Confucian cultural and intellectual tradition with modern political forms. And one can interpret many other current ‘internal’ political conflicts, such as the ‘Arab Spring’, and Arjomand’s own point of reference, the Iranian ‘revolution’, in these terms.9 Shils transcended the discussion of modernization of his own time through this method of analysis, and this points to an important feature of his mode of thinking generally. In the papers of his mentor Frank H. Knight one can observe a similar strategy: Knight would begin writing on a highly specific controversy or text, teasing out the nature of the conflict in question, and in successive drafts remove the specific references and restate the issues in more general terms, and in terms of the larger ideational conflicts at stake. One can see the same process in Shils’ papers, and even in the published work. In the foreword to The Torment of Secrecy (1956), he says, ‘I have not forborne to condemn … but I have tried to mould the book into something more than a polemic’ so that ‘what began as a polemic became a reformulation of the principles of a free, lasting, and dignified society’ (1956: 10). As noted, during the war in Indochina he wrote an eerily prescient but never published essay on the deep divisions in American society and the irreconcilability of the alternatives.10 In 1978, only a few years later, he published ‘The Antinomies of Liberalism’ ([1978] 1997a). This essay, which perhaps, in typical Shilsian fashion, was a revision of his earlier essay, raised the level of analysis from the particular conflict over the war to something more fundamental that divided the sides. He stressed the conflict between what he called collectivistic liberalism and the more traditional ‘autonomous liberal’ values of American society ([1978] 1997a: 180–7). But he saw this conflict, as the title suggests, as one of the antinomies of liberalism: a conflict growing out of and

introduction 23 intrinsic to the liberal tradition itself, but one which also threatened this tradition. Why today? Why reconsider Shils today? Shils sought to base his core ideas on what he took to be unquestionable facts about humans and social life. He did not deny that these facts were elusive and difficult to understand or to fit into a theoretical framework. He was well aware of the inadequacies of his predecessors in the face of this elusiveness, and the problematic character of their theoretical constructions, as well as the limitations of perspective that inevitably result from the distinctive historical situation of the thinker. But he also believed that intellectuals could to some extent transcend these limitations. He persisted in the self-given task of combining what he took to be basic insights about social life into a meaningful whole, but also into a conception that could illuminate and help define the important issues of the present. Shils’ core ideas – transcendence, charisma, the importance of personal relations, the notion of the centre, and so forth – retain their power for this reason. Yet today his interest is perhaps greatest in the tensions that he explored: between intellectuals and their societies, between conceptions of liberalism, between personal ties and political identities, and between collective self-conceptions. The slow working-out of these tensions appear more and more as the motors of change, and Shils himself appears more as a recorder and theorist of change. The field of sociology has moved away from his concerns, both from the kind of theorizing about social life he did and from the idea of a nonideological, value-free approach to the social. ‘Political’ is a term of commendation rather than critique. The changes in social theory and sociology are equally startling. ‘Oppression’ and its hidden springs, and the project of raising the consciousness of the oppressed about their oppression, has taken over in the few remaining bastions of any kind of theorizing in sociology. Pierre Bourdieu is lionized for adapting the idea of tradition, reframed as habitus, into an account of self-repression and misrecognition and thus a version of the doctrine of false consciousness. Does Shils have anything to say to us now about these topics? One can perhaps start with his comment on Wirth. Shils did not have the faiblesse for presuppositions that Wirth had. His approach to social theory was not based on a philosophical doctrine about the nature of social knowledge, or on a ‘methodology’. It was based instead on certain distinctive concrete appreciations: of the pull that what he called the centre had on the periphery, on the importance of the personal in constituting social worlds, and the specificity of the forms of personal relations, such as deference,

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respectability, and loyalty, and on the long historical trajectories of these relations. He was especially sensitive to the sacred in its many manifestations. But he was also concerned with conflicts: the ways in which our different kinds of bonds with one another, primordial, civil, and sacred, as he characterized them, can sometimes pull against each other and at other times cohere. Shils is thus still valuable as an alternative, an alternative to the kind of reductive social theory that either bases itself on a philosophical doctrine, as Habermas does, or a form of reductivist demystification which purports to reveal the secret oppressive workings of ordinary institutions, such as Bourdieu’s. It is also, as already noted, quite self-consciously, an alternative to a reductive kind of rational choice ‘Hobbism’. The alternative depends on the idea that individuals are capable of self-transcendence, that this is an elementary capacity of the human mind, and that it is called forth by what Shils characterized as ‘collective self-consciousness’, the consciousness of being part of something higher and bigger from which ‘belief in the obligations of … members of society toward each other’, norms and the validity of constitutions, and much else besides derives (2006a: 179). But as Shils also says, this consciousness is highly differentiated, and there are multiple identities and transcendental collectivities about which one is conscious, and the demands of these sometimes conflict. As Steven Grosby points out in his chapter, this is fundamentally a claim about the nature and capacities of human beings, a philosophical anthropology. It differs from system theories of society, in which systems have a kind of autonomous power over the individual. As Shils says, ‘the collective self-consciousness is a cognitive matter’ (2006a: 179). It is a kind of awareness. But it is essential to what he called the constitution of society. But this consciousness is not a group mind, or a collective consciousness. Society as constituted by a cognitive feature of individuals is real in W. I. Thomas’s sense of a definition of a situation being real in its consequences. But to be part of society, to have this collective selfconsciousness, is to become a ‘we’.11 The philosophical anthropology Grosby describes was self-conscious and also radically different from the implicit philosophical anthropology of his contemporaries. Both Parsons and the Frankfurt School were in thrall to Freud, as were such influential figures as Harold D. Lasswell. Shils made occasional references to these themes, but as Grosby shows, the locus of his conception of human motivation was elsewhere. But at the same time it was deeply social: it is a philosophical anthropology of humans in and oriented to society, through the transcendent and through human attachments. He rejected the fantastic images of mass society and depersonalized Gesellschaft that flourished at the time. Just

introduction 25 as Shils regarded the orientation towards transcendence as a basic fact about people, rather than as a philosophical presupposition; he regarded the centrality to human life of personal attachments as an incontestable given. These considerations combined with the notion of the centre and of transcendence to produce a distinctive picture of society as bound together by these human, personal attachments yet also oriented in subtle ways to the transcendent through the connections of members of primary groups to members with a special sensitivity to the transcendent. Part of the puzzle of Shils follows from the fact that Shils, despite his professional identification as a sociologist, does not neatly fit into this category, and as Grosby suggests, transcends it. Thomas Schneider raises the central questions of the interpretation of Shils’ corpus by contrasting two fundamentally different interpretations of Shils, one of which locates his thought in the general body of functionalist sociological theory of the mid-century in American sociology, the other a practice-theoretical interpretation which treats Shils as part of a body of thinking discussed here in later chapters on tradition, Polanyi, and Oakeshott. Thomas Schneider argues that these accounts are in conflict, and that each is insufficient. He focuses on Shils’ 1961 essay ‘The Calling of Sociology’ ([1961] 1980a), which provides an alternative vision of the role and intellectual contribution of sociology, unlike that of Parsons or Merton. As noted earlier, this essay roots the sociological impulse not in scientism, but in the larger problem of the self-consciousness of society, and the fact of man’s will to understand himself. This change had the effect of enlarging the sociological canon to include other, humanistic, thinkers. It opened him, Schneider argues, to a much more nuanced understanding of the nature of values, of culture as objective, and to the phenomenon of sacralization of social forms. But it also adds to the puzzle: while Shils had clearly moved away by this time from his much more optimistic and scientistic writing on the prospects of sociology in the late 1940s (discussed by Jeff Pooley in his chapter), he still expressed at this point some sense that the Parsonsian synthesis in the The Structure of Social Action ([1937] 1968), as well as its Freudian additions, were a significant ‘scientific’ step forward for sociology. But his scepticism is also obvious, in the passages in this essay that Schneider quotes on the barrenness of the ‘culture and personality’ approach that had grown out of this synthesis. And, as Schneider also notes, in this essay he is already signalling a turn to the concept of tradition, which is the core of a rival and alternative approach to the topics that the ‘culture and personality’ school had promised, but failed, to illuminate. Lenore Ealy explains the complexities of Shils’ account of tradition, and especially his views of the importance of tradition to civil society, and the

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difficulty of tradition sustaining itself. But she also explains the complexity and nuances of the problem of what a tradition is, of the nature and fragility of its authority, the means of its transmission through objects and practices, and the opposition to tradition, especially in the form of the scientistically inflected tradition of opposition to tradition. The implications for his general account of society of this argument are important: it shows Shils’ sense of the fragility of the social order over time as well as the centrality of tradition to the social institutions in terms of which people form attachments. And it also connects him with the alternative body of thought, in which tradition, understood not merely as the old established and unjustified, but as a living body of practices rooted in the tacit, plays a central role. This protean concept of tradition was also central to Michael Polanyi, his close friend. In his chapter, Phil Mullins explains this important personal relationship and its intellectual significance for both men. Polanyi was not only a friend, but a model for Shils – one of the triad of great thinkers with whom he was associated, whose other members were Park and Knight. The relationship with Polanyi, in contrast to the other two, went both ways. Polanyi’s idea of conviviality was indebted to Shils and his insights into the primary group. This relationship was important to Shils’ development in multiple ways. It introduced him to the great theme of what we may now call the liberal conception of science, in which the autonomy of the individual scientist was the central organizational value which institutions such as the university needed to protect. But Polanyi also was engaged with the concerns of Mannheim and the cultural crisis of the 1940s, and, as Mullins shows, was developing an account of these topics in relation to the Moot, an ongoing set of meetings of key intellectuals in London, as well as to the emerging and influential views of Karl Popper. These topics were an unusual amalgamation, which combined liberalism, science, and the problematics of culture and social reform. Shils largely agreed with Polanyi, but as Mullins shows, Shils repeatedly challenged Polanyi’s dismissal of the social sciences. Shils’ relationship with Mannheim was also formative, but in a different way. Christopher Adair-Toteff discusses this vexed relationship in relation to a concept central to both of them: ideology. He shows that Shils was first fascinated by, then increasingly sceptical of Mannheim, but that he retained his respect for him as a thinker who, even if wrong, was illuminating and fertile. The term ideology underwent significant changes from Mannheim’s usage in Shils’ hands as he revised the concept and contrasted it to civility. As Adair-Toteff shows, Shils did not believe in the ‘end of ideology’ in any simple sense, although he recorded the diminished allure

introduction 27 of Communism as an ideology in the 1950s. Rather he regarded the impulse to ideology to be universal, flowing for the need to provide a rational ordering of life, a need which became acute, and produced ideological formations, in times of crisis. There is another grand figure whose relation to Shils needs to be understood: Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott, like Polanyi and such Weimar refugees as Hans Morgenthau and Leo Strauss at Chicago, were born within a few years of each other, around 1900. Oakeshott was quintessentially English, but had studied in Germany, published a collection of texts on the ideologies of European politics in the pre-war period, and formed an important part of the post war anti-totalitarianism. As Efraim Podoksik shows in Chapter 6, Shils and Oakeshott were similar in declining to engage the issues in a polemical way. Instead, they developed a rich perspective that supported a non-ideological defence of liberalism as a lived practice. Podoksik shows how the two developed different but close and in many respects complementary perspectives, which nevertheless in the end fundamentally diverged. The divergence Podoksik identifies involves a theme which is distinctively important for Shils, and figured both in his personal outlook and in the sociology he approved of, such as Mitchell Duneier’s Slim’s Table (1992). Shils emphasized the importance of respectability, and its power in uplifting and supporting the better nature of people, and reacted against the decline of respectability as an ideal in the sexually liberated 1960s. Oakeshott was, famously, bohemian in his personal life, and something of a Romantic in his intellectual inclinations. This led Oakeshott, Podoksik argues, to be less concerned about anti-individualistic radicalism, which Shils saw manifested in ‘political correctness’, and loathed. In this respect he was less ‘conservative’ than Shils, and less concerned about radicalism as a genuine threat to civility. Civility was one of the conditions for the sustaining of a liberal political order that Shils highlighted. He developed an account of civility that perhaps owed something to his reaction to Carl Schmitt, who thought that these conditions had vanished. The conditions were those that provided conventions that allowed for rational political persuasion. As Richard Boyd points out, Shils regarded civility as a virtue necessary for a politics of discussion in a pluralistic liberal society. The ‘radical’ view of civility is that the conventions of civility are exclusionary and oppressive. It is ironic that the first elaborated appearance in Shils of the theme of relation of civility to pluralistic democracy, and of the necessity of dealing with ideological viewpoints hostile to civility, is in The Torment of Secrecy (1956), which is concerned largely with the Nativist, Right-wing threats to civility

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of the McCarthy era. But Shils, who was an admirer of Sidney Hook, also understood that the Left disvalued civility, and that the actions of the Left in that period provided political ammunition for Nativism. These were lessons of Weimar as well. Indeed, Shils’ long-running fascination with civility can be usefully read as a sociological counterpoint to the thinking of his long-time colleague on the Committee for Social Thought, Hannah Arendt. Pluralism is the great theme of Shils’ discussion of civility, and the connection between the inevitable and beneficial role of pluralistic disagreement and civility is close: the benefits of public contestation evaporate when civility is lost, and, as Boyd puts it, politics becomes a Schmittian struggle between friends and foes. But as Boyd also makes clear, civility for Shils is not so much a philosophy or ideology, but a tradition, whose ballast is not in the concerns of the elites or intellectuals, who are disposed to ideological contestation, but in the larger public, with its own diverse set of loyalties and interests; a public which largely turns a deaf ear to their concerns, but nevertheless allows them (ideological arguments for equality, for example) to be accommodated, though pluralistically, in the light of more basic ties and loyalties. As Boyd also shows, his account exemplifies Shils’ strategy of understanding apparent conflicts in terms of their more fundamental common roots, in this case the general development out of pre-modern hierarchialism of a shared, proto-democratic, sense of human dignity and therefore mutual respect, which both allows for pluralism and for the sense of shared membership in society. Peter Mentzel’s Chapter 8, on the relation of civility to nationalism and nationality, shows that this was also a concern of Shils, who regarded exclusionary nationalism as a threat to civility. Mentzel discusses the difficulties which flow from Shils’ attempt to associate national identity with a kind of consciousness of collective selfhood. This allowed him to argue that the ‘nation’ was a concept that applied to pre-modern territorial unities, rooted in primordial relations of kinship as well as the tie to the land, as well as to modern ones. This creates a problem with the concept of the nation-state – the self-consciousness and the political and territorial form of the state rarely coincide. But it answers a question that is also crucial to civility: what bonds motivate people to fulfil their obligations to one another? Nations depend on there being bonds rooted in a national self-understanding. It is of course intellectuals who provide answers to the problem of selfunderstanding, and they do so within societies and motivated by concerns specific to these societies. And Shils devoted much of his intellectual life, and much of his own energy, to understanding intellectuals and their motives, as well as the institutions that intellectuals inhabited. Jeff Pooley,

introduction 29 in his chapter, traces the development of Shils’ thinking about intellectuals. Pooley begins with the central motivating puzzle for Shils: why do intellectuals reject their own societies? The answer he arrived at was this: intellectuals did not so much reject the moral ideals of their own society as adhere to them in an impossibly purified form which led them to reject their countrymen for failing to live up to them. Pooley shows how this theme, and Shils’ elaboration of it, serves as a guiding thread through Shils’ thinking as a whole, especially his view of civility and the threats to civility by the ideologically inclined. Nevertheless, as Pooley points out, Shils revered intellectuals. Much of his later career was devoted to two tasks: remembering and memorializing the true scholars and great intellectuals he had encountered, or who had spent their careers in Chicago or Cambridge. His three books of memoirs, two edited collections (Shils, ed., 1991b; Shils and Blacker, eds, 1996), and a collection of his own memoirs (Shils 1997g), are a kind of elegy to scholars of a type he saw as disappearing but also as embodiments of an academic ideal that he believed to be worth preserving. Bryan S. Turner provides an appreciation and analysis of these texts, which convey in their particulars an expression of Shils’ deepest academic values and indeed are revealing about Shils himself. But the real significance of the portraits, as Turner suggests, is as a record of what has been lost. Despite Shils’ fascination with non-academic intellectuals, bohemians, and literary traditions, he was deeply concerned with the university and its fate. He was a central player in the response of the University of Chicago to the crises of the 1960s, and was an active defender of the idea of the university as an autonomous and protected domain in which freedom of teaching and research was protected, considerations of academic merit ruled, and the state respected this autonomy. But as Shils saw from very early on, this model was threatened by the flood of government grant money in science, which eroded the ability of scientists to choose to do research on the projects they believed to be most promising. But the academic tradition was more deeply threatened by those who saw the university as an instrument for the achievement of other purposes, such as social reform, an instrument of state policy, or as a business incubator. Philip Altbach’s chapter surveys his long engagement with these issues and explains his concerns, and the significance of the model of the university that we have now lost, but which, as Weber said in another context, prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. The richness of Shils’ account of the great university tradition is not merely an exercise in nostalgia. It raises the question of whether its replacement is capable of performing the central task of the pursuit of truth.

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the calling of social thought Notes

1 ‘An Autobiographical Note in regards to Max Weber’. Edward Shils Papers. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Box 64, Series 2, pp. 43–7; pp. 43–4. 2 ‘Another Approach to the Same Thing’. Edward Shils Papers. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Box 64, Series 2, pp. 24a–24e, 165–79, a)–f); pp. 171–2. 3 ‘Another Approach to the Same Thing’. Edward Shils Papers, pp. 171–4. 4 ‘Another Approach to the Same Thing’. Edward Shils Papers, pp. 171–4. 5 The comments that follow are not an attempt to provide a full biography, but to explain Shils’ significance as a person and thinker. Aside from Shils’ own autobiographical sketch, which Steven Grosby constructed from material in his papers, there are multiple sources on Shils’ biography, all of which are quite partial. Particularly useful is Roy MacLeod’s ‘Consensus, Civility, and Community: The Origins of Minerva and the Vision of Edward Shils’ in Minerva (2016), which focuses on Shils’ relations to science, and the papers in the special issue of Minerva published after his death, which provide personal details on important relationships. Christopher Husbands’ forthcoming book on the history of sociology at the LSE will shed a somewhat different light on this period. There is much that is simply not known or not understood about his life at this crucial time. Shils was of course an avid memoirist of people he knew, collected in Portraits (1997g), and his personality appears in many of these portraits. The literature on Saul Bellow includes many references to Shils (see Atlas, 2000; Leader, 2015), which are also revealing. A full biography would of course be welcome. 6 Herbert Goldhamer Affadavit, 17 February 1954: 5–6. Edward Shils Papers. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Box 6, Series 111. 7 ‘American Nativism’, manuscript, 1946–47. Edward Shils Papers. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Box 63, Series 2, pp. 1–53; p. 43. 8 Arjomand omits the passage that follows, which belies his claim of a blind spot: ‘Changes in the external situation of a social system, either in its environmental conditions (as in the case of the depletion or discovery of some natural resource), changes in its technology which are not autonomous, changes in the social situation of the system (as in its foreign relations), may be cited as the chief exogenous factors in change’ (Parsons and Shils, 1951: 232). It should be noted, however, that Shils soon abandoned the use of Parsonsian language and never returned to it. A useful overview of the Shils– Parsons relationship, which briefly involved Polanyi as well, is in Moodey, 2013. http://polanyisociety.org/tad%20web%20archive/tad39–3/tad39–3-fnlpg5–28-pdf.pdf (accessed 14 February 2018). 9 The complexities of the Iranian situation and its relations with the great powers are usefully discussed in Judt and Lacorne, eds, (2005). The point made in this article bears on other states as well: Great Power actions were not

introduction 31 merely external interventions, but were used by domestic political movements for their own purposes. Shils’ approach, by focusing on the elites and their intellectual construction of the issues, allowed him to analyse the dilemmas and antinomies behind their actions. 10 ‘American Society and the War in Indochina’. Edward Shils Papers. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Box 1, Series 1, pp. 1–32. 11 Shils devoted an unpublished manuscript to the topic of ‘we’ (‘Personal and ideological primary groups’), which combined an acceptance of the centrality of the capacity to form a ‘we’ to his own thinking with an acknowledgement of the mysterious nature of this fundamental capacity (‘Another Approach to the Same Thing’. Edward Shils Papers. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Box 6, Series 1, pp. 24a–24e).

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The philosophical anthropology of Edward Shils Steven Grosby Edward Shils is often referred to as a sociologist. This description of Shils and his work can be misleading because of what sociology has become. For many, sociology means the search for what either is not worth knowing or is already known, and a pursuit of a technocratic manipulation of individuals in the service of achieving what the sociologist views to represent an improvement of society. This latter pursuit is often joined with another trajectory: an uncompromising, oppositional stance towards the sociologist’s own society, conveying a radical distrust of the inherited order of that society. Shils never understood the purpose or calling of sociology in these ways. The questions before us are, what did Shils think was the calling of sociology, and, given his understanding of that calling, what assumptions and preoccupations unified the wide subject matter of his voluminous writings?1 We know that he understood his work as having been informed by a philosophical anthropology, for a section of his lengthy essay ‘The Calling of Sociology’ is so designated (Shils, [1961] 1980a: 32–50). What were those philosophical–anthropological observations? The calling of sociology Shils rightly knew that the oppositional stance of much of sociology rests upon a distorted view of social relations that often, even if unacknowledged, draws on the theoretically antiquated, historically unequivocal contrast between Ferdinand Tönnies’ ([1887] 2001) dichotomous categories of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, with their respective forms of action of Wesenwille and Kürwille. That dichotomy incorrectly portrayed modern society as entirely constituted isolated individuals each of whom, through the deliberative calculation characteristic of Kürwille, pursues exclusively his or her own interests – a pursuit that was thought could only be at the expense of the interests of other individuals.2 This oppositional view ignores that the division of labour of not only the market but also other spheres of activity of modern society provides a basis for co-operation



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among a large population. It also wilfully minimizes or even dismisses those traditions and that consensus that make possible the relative stability of the competition of the market and the diverse pursuits of humanity, for example, the rule of law, religious toleration, freedom of speech, and the expansion of the ‘fellow feeling’ of kinship beyond that of the family and the face-to-face relations of the integrative Wesenwille of the local Gemeinschaft to include the territorially extensive nation. Overlooked, or, actually, often unknown, is that Tönnies modified his dichotomous classification as a result of the patriotism of the First World War, when the gemeinschaftliche expression of attachment, Wesenwille, had manifested itself in the modern Gesellschaft ([1925] 1971; [1926] 1971). Society is not merely a geographical framework for the division of labour and the market. It is also a more or less stable pattern of coherence and consensus. Understanding the character of that pattern – the bonds that hold a large-scale society together – and the various challenges to it, including its attenuation and internal tensions as manifested, for example, in the relation of the periphery of a society to its centre – were the problems that preoccupied Shils throughout his writings on so many different subjects, spanning a period of approximately sixty years.3 Shils came to the conclusion that a more accurate understanding of human action, attachment, and society requires a differentiation of Tönnies’ dichotomous classification. In his collaboration with Talcott Parsons which led to Toward a General Theory of Action, that differentiation took the form of the ‘pattern variables’ (Parsons and Shils, 1951: 76–91). They were not the first to reach this conclusion, as Shils and Parsons followed the analytical tradition of Max Weber’s own differentiation, as presented in Economy and Society ([1968] 1978: 24–6, 215–16), of Tönnies’ categories: the four types of social action – the instrumentally rational, value-rational, affectual, and traditional – and the corresponding forms of legitimate domination – rational, traditional, and charismatic.4 After the publication in 1951 of Toward a General Theory of Action, finding the formulation of the ‘pattern variables’ too schematic and abstract, Shils refined that differentiation in the book-length manuscript which he never published, Love, Belief, and Civility.5 Remaining unsatisfied with this manuscript, he continued to clarify its analytical categories. Shortly thereafter, in 1957 he published the results of his efforts by formulating four orientations of attachment: primordial, personal, sacred, and civil (Shils, [1957] 1975a). Oppositional sociology’s adoption of an unrealistic, distorted view of modern society, as being entirely without any gemeinschaftliche and consensual attachments, has further simplified human action by positing empirically unjustified categories such as the ‘authoritarian personality’,

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or ‘mass society’ made up of lonely individuals.6 In doing so, it rejects a more realistic view of the human being and social relations that led Weber, Parsons, and Shils to recognize the need for a more complicated differentiation, historically and conceptually, of human action. More recently oppositional sociology has fixated on ‘power’ in such a way that relations between human beings are thought to be only those where power is exercised by one over another, thereby excluding those traditions and that consensus that make possible what human beings also do when they exercise power with one another. In contrast to both sociology’s technocratic manipulation and its combination with opposition, often described today as ‘critical theory’, Shils argued that the true calling of sociology was to contribute to the always developing consensus of a society through furthering ‘the permanent and necessary effort of man to understand himself and his species’ (1980a: 32). While realizing that not all control of others is necessarily immoral, for example, the education of children, he consistently rejected manipulation of adults, however well intended; for manipulation cannot avoid bringing about the degradation of humanity, because it undermines the character of the individual by subverting one’s freedom to direct one’s own affairs and to do so responsibly with other members of one’s society. Shils recognized that the experience of living in a large society entails not only that experience but also understanding oneself as being a member of that society (1981a: 185). To live a life responsible for one’s decisions, unavoidably in concert with others, requires that there be a developing image of what a just society of ordered liberty should be, that this image has a bearing on an individual’s decisions and actions, and that this image is shared among the members of that society. The existence of this image, the capacity of the human mind both to have the image and to share it with others – what Shils (1975a) referred to as ‘consensus’ and what in his later writings he called ‘collective self-consciousness’ (Shils, 1997a, 2006a) – entails deliberation and discussion about what a just society should be, including taking into account the unavoidable and ever-changing complications that any society of ordered liberty faces in the realization of that image. It also assumes that it is possible to orient one’s conduct to that image. Both the necessity for deliberation and discussion, on the one hand, and the capacity of the individual to orient his or her conduct to that developing image arising out of that deliberation and discussion to which sociology, properly understood, can contribute, on the other, are denied by both the technocratic and oppositional currents of sociology. Those currents assume that the majority of the population is not capable of either deliberation and discussion, or reaching conclusions that are necessary for



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the existence of a just society, however ambiguous and tension-ridden the conception of ‘just’ may be. Shils’ argument for the necessity of deliberation and discussion rests upon several related observations. Obviously, he thought that human beings are not unthinking brutes who, as such, can only be objects to be manipulated. He thought that there had occurred a moral development, although uneven and continually challenged, of human civilization, where: (1) the dignity of each and every individual, as conveyed, for example, by the world monotheistic religions, is recognized; and (2) the individual and associations of individuals, for example, churches, universities, business firms, and nations, are free to pursue their own, respectively distinctive purposes, as represented by the earlier traditions of liberalism found, for example, in the tradition of the English common law and the works of writers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Thus, according to Shils, the task of sociology is to understand the human being as an organism with moral, cognitive, and rational capacities and ideals – a task that entails the effort of the mind to understand itself. From this perspective, sociological analysis becomes ‘a variant in a contemporary idiom of the great efforts to render judgement on humanity’s vicissitudes on earth’ (Shils, 1980a: 32). The results of this effort and judgement are not to isolate sociology from a society of individuals by viewing them as incapable of participating in the rendering of that judgement, as implied by the technocratic and oppositional traditions of sociology. When the social scientist views his or her purpose as developing policy for the state and only through the state in order to improve the lives of its citizens, the social scientist acts as if he or she were a secular theocrat, laying down the lines of what is, de facto, viewed by him or her to be an omniprovident government, as if the state were the religiously ordained instrument for the improvement of society (Shils, 1997c: 198–9, 205). Rather, the calling of sociology is to present those results as contributions to the deliberation and discussion of the members of a society on the character of their society, to the developing self-understanding or consensus of their society through an analysis that rests upon categories that acknowledge the humanity of humanity. That is why Shils (1980a: 79–92) referred to the proper task of sociology as being humanely ‘consensual’, rather than either ‘technocratic’ or ‘oppositional’ which, once again, are both coercive, thus, degrading of what makes humanity humane. As implied in the above observations, this understanding of sociology is based on a number of philosophical–anthropological observations to which we now explicitly turn. For Shils, a human being is not simply an

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organism bounded by an epidermis and set into a physical–biological environment. He or she is not just an individual seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, calculating his or her self-interest. Shils did not deny the importance of such calculation, or economic behaviour; rather, his objection was to simplifying human behaviour by reducing it entirely to that behaviour. In addition to one’s self-awareness of oneself as an individual with one’s own desires, there is also a human capacity for consensus, for reaching agreement with others. Both this individuality and shared awareness have always been present among humans, albeit in historically different proportions. Thus, the consensual capacity of human beings is not to be contrasted with individuality; rather it has, in fact, grown proportionally with individuality (Shils, 1980a: 34). The inability to see that within the consciousness of the self there is this simultaneous awareness of the individual both as an individual and as a member of a society, and that the latter has a bearing on human attachment and action, is why the still influential dichotomous classification of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, or variations of it, for example, Henry Sumner Maine’s contrast between status and contract, have to be modified ([1861] 1970: 163–5).7 A more accurate appraisal of the self-consciousness of the individual is one in which there is recognized both consciousness of the self and consciousness of the self in relation to, or part of, a larger society. After all, all languages have both the first-person singular ‘I’ and the first-person plural ‘we’. It is, of course, difficult to trace precisely the origin of ideas; but it may be that Shils’ understanding of the simultaneous awareness of the individual that he or she is both an individual and a member of a larger society reveals the influence of Frank H. Knight’s work on Shils’ thought. Knight had earlier observed that it is a ‘fundamental error’ to ‘take the individual as a given’, in such a way that the individual is the datum for purposes of social policy ([1939] 1982: 84–5). Knight properly recognized that ‘some sort of family life, and far beyond that, some kind of wider primary-group and culture-group life, of a considerable degree of stability, must be taken as they are, as data’. In fact, Knight further thought that ‘to safeguard [those primary groups and institutions] where it is necessary, and improve them where it is possible, must be the first concern of any intelligent social policy’.8 Irrespective of the possibility or even likelihood of Knight’s influence on the development of these of Shils’ thoughts, Shils’ analyses of the primary group during the 1940s and 1950s led him to a more accurate understanding of both the individual and society (Shils, [1950] 1975a; Shils and Janowitz, [1948] 1975a). As the history of the development of his thought on these problems was discussed by him in the article ‘Primordial,



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Personal, Sacred, and Civil Ties’ (Shils, [1957] 1975a), the lengthy introduction to volume II of his Selected Papers, Center and Periphery (Shils, 1975a: vii–xliii), and A Fragment of a Sociological Autobiography (Shils, 2006a), we focus on addressing a different, although clearly related problem: what does Shils’ analysis of the self-consciousness of the individual mean for his understanding of the mind and his philosophical anthropology? A necessary component of Shils’ philosophical anthropology is his recognition that the human being has the mental ability to project beyond himself or herself, to see oneself as part of a society beyond the boundaries of one’s skin and person, to locate oneself in social contexts beyond one’s immediate experience of locale and time. This capacity for geographical and temporal extension, abetted by memory and imagination, allows the individual to incorporate the images of others, alive and no longer living, of those not only with whom one has had face-to-face encounters but also with those whom one has never met, into an intermittently open self. However, for Shils, this geographical and temporal extension of the individual’s understanding of the self is not merely an ability; rather, it is a persistent expression of the human need to be in contact with the past, to feel continuous with it, to be in its presence. This need is a part of that need for a cognitive map which ‘locates’ the self in a perceived order and meaning of the universe (Shils, 1980a: 54). The need for this location is expressed in the capacity of the human mind to have an image of one’s society and for that image to be shared with other members of that society. All human action takes place between what has been and what might be. As we stumble towards ‘what might be’, not only do past accomplishments and failures provide the setting for action, but so, too, does another past: the not necessarily factually accurate memory of those accomplishments and failures, including especially the significance, that is, meaning, we attribute to them (Shils, 1981a: 195). Herein lies the philosophical– anthropological basis for Shils’ appreciation of tradition, namely the contact with, or more precisely, the interpretation of, the past as continuous with the present, specifically, its reception into the present. And herein lies the philosophical–anthropological basis for Shils’ appreciation of religion, namely the recognition or assertion, as the case may be, of a meaning to human existence. Religion, as the vehicle par excellence for the meaning of human existence, hence, as a bearer of hope, entails the likely anthropological necessity for the generation of myth that asserts that meaning. This human need to see oneself as only a fragment of, or a stage in, a larger being, temporally and territorially, which might be familial, neighbourly, ethnic, national, or, as with the monotheistic religions, humanity as a whole, and situating that larger being within the universe has, once again, a bearing on how one understands oneself; and that self-understanding,

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in turn, has a bearing on one’s conduct, as Weber had observed, especially in his writings on religion. The human being, qua human, is open to the world. The mind of the individual is not dominated by, or confined to, the body’s instinctual apparatus, as is the case with the rest of the animal kingdom. Thus, Shils agreed with that tradition of philosophical anthropology, represented by such writers as Hans Freyer ([1927] 1998), Max Scheler ([1928] 1961), Helmuth Plessner ([1928] 1975; [1953] 1982), and Arnold Gehlen [1974] 1988), that the human animal is instinctually ‘underdetermined’. The human being displays a capacity for a remarkable array of experimentation and adaptation. One example of this openness to the world, this wide array of experimentation and adaptation, is the capacity to build habitats not only in environments hospitable to its biological existence, as is the case with the rest of the animal kingdom, but also in those environments hostile to the existence of life, as in outer space. A corollary of this openness that is crucially important for the analytical framework of Shils’ philosophical anthropology is that the human mind has the cognitive capacity for rational judgement and action, for affectual attachment, for aesthetic expression, creation, and response, and for moral decision. The individual poses questions to himself or herself about how he or she should act, and, in doing so, about what a just society should be, thereby conveying the moral capacity of the human mind. Shils’ recognition of the need for this cognitive map or order can be understood as placing him in the so-called functionalist tradition, that is, where the cognitive compulsion to locate the self in a larger society represents a component necessary for the stability of both individual selfconsciousness and collective self-consciousness or consensus of a society. However, to confine Shils’ philosophical anthropology to this interpretation is to misunderstand it. For Shils, human beings are not only animals seeking order. They are that, but they are also animals who yield to temptations while also erecting resistances to those temptations; they exercise authority, submit to it, are fascinated by it, and yet can also rebel against it. Shils clearly agreed with Frank H. Knight (1935: 301–9) that human beings are both rule-making and rule-breaking animals. Religion, for example, not only contributes to social order by providing meaning to it and its place in the universe, as the functionalists argue; it also passes judgement on that order, and, in so doing, disrupts it. These observations ought to be uncontroversial. They are a realistic appraisal of what human beings are and what they do. They take human beings seriously, including their humanity and the always tension-filled consensual element in their relationships. They do not measure human beings and their relations against some standard of perfection, for example,



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some version of an idealized Gemeinschaft, because they do not assume what we do not know, namely, what perfection is, let alone that human beings are capable of perfection. They stand in contrast to the technocratic tradition of sociology, as the latter accepts either some kind of mechanistic or behaviouristic conception of human beings, or a view of human beings as merely calculators of their interests that accrue only to their immediate selves. These observations exclude neither the importance of the biological foundation of human behaviour nor economic decision in human action; but they recognize that the human animal is more complicated than either the behaviourism or the homo economicus that technocratic sociology assumes. Pluralism Clearly, the possibility of a consensual sociology rests upon the philosophical–anthropological observations of the capacity of the mind for detachment. The ability of the mind for detachment, to transcend the immediacy of the body and its experiences, is the biological prerequisite for both rational judgement and action, and for the anthropological flexibility of the affectual attachment of kinship to encompass individuals beyond those of the family. Here, we find the bases for Shils’ categories of the ‘personal’ and the ‘primordial’. The mind’s capacity for detachment also allows for the emergence of not only a recognition of society beyond face-to-face relations but also a vision of what one thinks a society should be. It is the anthropological basis for the possibility of the individual to act ‘disinterestedly’, what Adam Smith ([1759] 1982: 82–5, 128–32, 153–6) referred to as the ‘impartial spectator’ within the self-consciousness of the individual. Here, we find the basis for Shils’ category of the ‘civil’ and its corresponding virtue of civility (Shils, 1997a). It is at precisely this point where Shils pushed further his differentiation of Tönnies’ dichotomous classification. Shils did not think that consciousness, consciousness of the self, and the consciousness of the self as a participant in different social relations were uniform. He evidently thought that the emergence of these levels or strata of consciousness expressed respectively different orientations of the mind depending upon the problems confronted by the individual. The individual’s awareness, beyond that of the satisfaction of immediate bodily needs, of the individual’s existence in the world compels the formation of social relations. Those relations are persistently differentiated; that is, one social relation is neither derivative of, nor comparable to, another. Each has a logic or purpose of its own that corresponds to a distinctive problem of human existence. That awareness, or consciousness, is not to be

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confused with consciousness of the self, as the latter entails the determination of the shifting boundaries within self-consciousness between the individual’s awareness of the self in the world and the individual’s understanding of the self as a participant in, or member of, various social relations. It is not only that there exists an ‘I’ and a ‘we’, but also that various kinds of ‘we’ form a part of how the individual understands the ‘I’. Because these bonds of primordial, personal, sacred, and civil relations are persistent, they may be designated as ‘anthropological’ to convey being ubiquitous, although one may be ascendant over another at any particular time. When one relation is carried too far at the expense of another, the natural or anthropological pluralism of human affairs, and the artful adjudication between the diverse demands arising from that pluralism, are undermined and thereby ideologically deformed (Shils, [1958b] 1972a; [1968] 1972a). Of course, the persistence of these diverse orientations does not mean that they have not undergone historical variation, for clearly they have. For example, the ‘primordial’ forms of kinship have varied historically and across civilizations, but the significance of kinship for human beings remains. The same may clearly be observed about the variability of forms of the ‘sacred’, for example, ancestor worship, nature religions, and the ethical religions of monotheism, but the significance of religion persists. Similarly, the political distribution of power has obviously varied greatly over time, yet the ‘civil’ ties between members of a society, indicating relations beyond those of the kinship group, living under the jurisdiction of the law of a state, has existed across numerous historical periods and civilizations. That the mind has capacity for detachment seems obvious enough, even though denied in varying degrees by behaviourism and the tradition of rational choice (see Shils, 2006b). The historical and anthropological examples confirming that capacity are many. We find it, for example, in Christian and Buddhist monasticism, where the otherwise compelling biological demands of sexual relations and procreation are denied. In this case, the biological requirement to procreate exists in tension with the mind’s search for the meaning of that procreation and human existence in general. The analyst is, thus, confronted with different orientations of the mind, as the individual faces the likely persistent problems of human existence: ‘personal’ relations, with its attendant concept of the individual’s private sphere (see Shils, 1956: 201–7; 1966b); ‘primordial’ relations of nativity, as manifested in various forms of kinship, including historically pervasive territorial kinship; ‘civil’ relations of citizens living together in society under law; and ‘sacred’ relations, most obviously conveyed by various religions.



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To take another example of the heterogeneity of the orientations of the mind, including, what should never be lost sight of, tensions within a particular orientation, consider the ambiguity of the category of ‘freedom’. On the one hand, to be free may refer to relief from current burdens by restoring a previous condition before those burdens were imposed, as conveyed by our use of the verb ‘to liberate (from)’. In this instance, the individual would, for example, be relieved from crushing debt or liberated from slavery, thereby restoring the condition before the individual was in debt or enslaved. This appears to be the meaning conveyed by those approximately 4,000-year-old terms, the Sumerian amargi and the Akkadian andurāru, which scholars often translate as ‘freedom’ (see Assyrian Dictionary; Snell, 2001). Because these terms from ancient Mesopotamian culture convey a restoration of a previous way of life, we may characterize their meaning of freedom as traditional. A different meaning of freedom is conveyed when the term designates a course of action where the individual, confronted with a problem, takes the initiative to do something different, when the individual has latitude of action to do something new. When we today use the term ‘freedom’, we use it with both meanings, even though we, for the most part, understand the term to convey the ability of the individual to embark on a new and different course of action that is determined solely by the individual. The first meaning conveys a reference to tradition, albeit its restoration as a realization of freedom, while the second conveys an innovative departure from tradition, the existence of which is viewed as an obstacle to freedom. The simultaneous existence of different meanings or different nuances of meanings within a sign, in this case, ‘freedom’, is by no means unusual. It is, in fact, not only typical but also unavoidable, as the reception of meaning (and tradition in general) always undergoes a sometimes sharply contested modification by bringing what is in the past into the present, thereby subjecting the past to the demands of the present. However, just as important for understanding Shils’ philosophical anthropology is that this simultaneous existence (and modification) of different meanings conveyed by a sign presupposes both a heterogeneity of the orientations of the mind and tensions within each of those orientations. As previously observed, Shils refined and advanced his differentiation of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, of Wesenwille and Kürwille, by recognizing that the bonds which hold society together are diverse, that is, qualitatively different in their orientation. They are not only diverse, but they also should not be historically segregated. Even within the traditionbound societies of the past, the human mind, qua human, had the capacity for detachment, to say ‘no’. In this sense, there is, if you will, a natural

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liberalism of the human condition. Moreover, the societies of the past were not merely isolated villages or tribes, for there were also metropolises, for example, Babylon, Alexandria, and Rome, markets, and geographically extensive trade. Deserving of emphasis is that to recognize human relations as qualitatively diverse means that one persistent orientation is not derivative of another; thus, attachments do not differ merely by degrees of the intensity of interaction. In fact, the very use of the term ‘interaction’ is misleading, as it obscures the participation of individuals, through their recognition, in the meaning or evaluative significance of a particular and distinctive orientation borne by a tradition. It ignores both the cognitive element in the orientation of the action and the distinctiveness of that pattern of cognition. The cognitive element exists in the individual’s perception of the features or properties of each acting subject’s own individual self and of others who each faces or imagines. Those perceived features or properties are bearers of the particular meaning conveyed by a distinctive social relation. The perception of those properties is a participation in a tradition. Each of those different traditions is a response to human consciousness addressing one of the correspondingly diverse, persistent problems of life: the propagation and transmission of life, the freedom and order of life, and meaning of life itself, respectively, the primordial, civil, and sacred. Shils may not have explicitly posited these problems and the relations formed to address them as a Lebensphilosophie, but that is what his analysis represents. Shils’ understanding of society was one of ‘an incessant interplay of creativity, discipline, refusal and consensus, against a shifting scene of primordial, civil, sacred and personal objects’ (1980a: 5). Life opens up one being to another – what Shils referred to as the need for conviviality – and, yet, it also erects boundaries secluding one individual from another – what Shils referred to as the need for privacy.9 The heterogeneity of these orientations, and the artful adjudication of the tensions arising from their coexistence which Shils (1997a) designated as ‘civility’, are central to understanding Shils’ understanding of the individual, social relations, and society. Making more explicit the implications of these different orientations in Shils’ work is a necessary step to moving forward his analysis. Doing so reveals the rich anthropological insights of that analysis. It is, I think, a productive framework for understanding the pluralism in human affairs (see Grosby, 2002). Primordial relations are those whose object is nativity, that is, the significance attributed to biological connections or lines of descent (Grosby, 2011). They are forms of kinship organized around what is perceived as



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necessary for the propagation and transmission of life. The family is the most obvious primordial collectivity of kinship. However, forms of kinship have by no means been limited to the family, as kinship based on recognition of birth or residence in a territory is found throughout all historical periods and across civilizations, ranging, for example, from the category of the ‘house of PN (the eponymous ancestor)’ in the ancient Near East to the modern nation. This territorial expansiveness of kinship should not be surprising, for not only are relations of matrilineal and patrilineal descent responses to the problem of the propagation and transmission of life, but so, too, is territory, as it is seen to be necessary for the sustenance of life. Civil relations are those between individuals beyond primordial ties, and, hence, have society, as distinguished from the family, as their object. They are life’s response to the problem of how life should be ordered in such a society, examples of which are keeping one’s promises (or honouring one’s contract), the rule of law, private property, and freedom of speech, thought, and assembly. They make possible the stability of the relation between otherwise anonymous individuals offering goods and services to one another in the marketplace. In addition, within the perspective of this Lebensphilosophie, the state maintains life by keeping the peace and protects life in war with other states. What Shils designated as sacred ties are those relations formed in response to the individual’s search for a meaning of life in the face of the unavoidable uncertainty of the universe and the future in general. Human existence occurs in an ultimately inscrutable universe, that is, there are unavoidable limits to human knowledge. Thus, all religions, to be sure in varying degrees, convey a paradox or tension: on the one hand, a meaning of life that places the individual and society in a perceived order of the universe, and, on the other, the mystery of the relation between the individual and the universe – a mystery represented symbolically by the location of the god(s) in the heavens, that is, beyond human reach and comprehension. Cultures may be distinguished from one another by the degree of emphasis attributed to one of these orientations over another. For example, a pagan culture has within its centre an ascendant primordial orientation, while a Christian culture has within its centre an ascendant orientation to a meaning of life dependent upon the transcendental ideal of agape. A liberal culture has ascendant within its centre the civil relation of ordered liberty. Of course, this is a simplified and schematic comparison. The existence of a culture means that these diverse orientations have achieved a stable coherence with one another. A unity among them has been established into a symbolic centre. Shils (1975a: 3–4) defined the ‘centre’ as the order of symbols, of values and beliefs, which are standards

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of judgement and action, representing a consensual pattern that governs society. This order or realm of symbols, once it had taken form – or ‘objectivated’ – out of the ebb and flow of life achieves an existence independent of life, although an existence requiring animation by life through acknowledgment and acceptance of those symbols, values, and beliefs; and it is this independent existence which is meant by the term ‘culture’. Shils’ understanding of culture and its independence can already be observed in the chapter on ‘Systems of Value-Orientation’ in Toward a General Theory of Action (Parsons and Shils, 1951: 159–89). At times, some of Shils’ arguments about the character of culture bear some similarity to those of Simmel’s Lebenanschauung, although Shils did not attribute any influence from Simmel on the development of his thought on the character of culture. He did, however, acknowledge, in addition to the works of Max Weber, Robert E. Park, and Frank H. Knight, the influence of the works of Simmel’s student, Hans Freyer’s Theory of Objective Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Culture ([1927] 1998) and Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft (1930), on his understanding of culture, as well as Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge (1972) and Michael Polanyi’s works on science, liberty, and tradition. This unity or coherence of the centre of a culture, however, can only be relative. The ascendancy of one orientation over another does not mean, nor could it mean, that the other orientations either no longer exist or do not exert an influence on the conduct of the individual.What it means is that an accommodation between these diverse orientations has been achieved, resulting in a relative stability, for example, in the liberal tradition, the uneasy separation of Church and State. Tensions among and within these diverse orientations persist; they are unavoidable. Thus, this unity that is manifested in the existence of a culture should never be understood to indicate a uniformity. The distinction between unity and uniformity is crucial for a proper understanding of human action, relation, and society, even though it has not been sufficiently acknowledged and appreciated in the social sciences and the Geisteswissenschaften. Conclusion By ‘pluralism’ I do not refer to the separation of classes, or the continuing distinctions of regionalism within a national society, or the coexistence of ethnicities or different religions. And I do not mean it to refer to ‘pluralistic politics’, with its attendant civility, as distinct from ‘ideological politics’ (see Shils, 1956: 225–34). While pluralism encompasses all of these, the term as I have used it here in regards to Shils’ philosophical anthropology refers to qualitatively diverse orientations of the human mind and the



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expression of that heterogeneity in human action and relation. Furthermore, the term connotes that these orientations, while influencing one another, are independent in their origin. One is not derivative of another. Those orientations emerge from the consciousness of the individual, as the individual faces the world, of the problems posed by life to the individual. For Shils (1981a: 323), ‘nature is a problem-generating system; and man is a problem-engendering animal. He finds problems, he creates problems.’ Those problems are also both distinctive and persistent. Thus, the use of the term ‘pluralism’ certainly does not refer to a relativism of values where, in fact, there are no values. Rather, as Shils recognized these diverse orientations of primordial, personal, sacred, and civil ties to be persistent, one may characterize his philosophical anthropology as a ‘principled pluralism’. One finds a formulation of an institutional expression of this ‘principled pluralism’, where a particular institution is a bearer of one of these distinct orientations, in Shils’ Jefferson Lectures of 1979, ‘in a pluralistic society each sector and type of institution has its own legitimate objectives and responsibilities; that the objectives of one sphere [or institution] are not always in harmony with those of another sphere [or institution]; that one should not arrogate to itself the tasks of another or attempt to dominate them’ (Shils, 1997c: 230). As one may anticipate from this quotation, the depth and breadth of this principled pluralism in the thought of Edward Shils can be seen in his analysis seemingly at some distance from the primordial, personal, sacred, and civil ties that form a society, namely, his analysis of the university and its relation to the state. In these lectures, Shils used Matthew 22:21, ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’, as a metaphor for the relation between the sphere of the state to the sphere of science and learning. The latter falls properly under the jurisdiction of the institutions of higher education, the university. It is a sphere of life which has its own necessities, both intellectual and moral (Shils, 1997c: 178). The orientation of the pattern of conduct of the university is to disinterested learning, permeated by an ethos of devotion to the task of discovery and transmission of truths that are of intrinsic value (Shils, 1997c: 183). It does not exist for the securing of order of a society, for securing peace; those tasks belong to the state. It also does not exist for the implementation of the state’s social policies. Needless to say, recognition of these diverse institutions with their respectively distinctive purposes does not mean that the university and the state do not have obligations to one another; but for the purposes of examining the principled pluralism of Shils’ thought, these brief remarks on how an institutional differentiation is a continuation of the differentiation of human action and social relation will suffice.

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I do not know why Max Weber’s observations about the different directions of rationality, specifically, formal and substantive, and the different types of social action have not had the influence they deserve on the social sciences and the Geisteswissenschaften. Perhaps those observations have been overwhelmed by the technocratic and oppositional tendencies among intellectuals. Perhaps an insatiable craving for intellectual simplification is another, more important reason for their lack of influence. Be that as it may, it is clear that Shils continued and deepened those observations. And he did so with a philosophical anthropology that richly deserves to be acknowledged and pondered. In fact, it may be that the most profitable way to understand Shils’ work is to place it in the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Notes 1 Bibliographies of Shils’ writings are found in Shils 1997a: 357–9; 1997b: 341–67 and Schneider 2016: 467–73. 2 For an analysis of the limitations of the dichotomy, see Grosby 2011: 280–9. 3 On the relation between centre and periphery, see Shils 1975b. For Shils’ understanding of these problems, see Shils 2006a. 4 Examples of other, early differentiations of Tönnies’ categories are Schmalenbach [1922] 1977 and Plessner 1924. 5 This unpublished, 800-page manuscript is in Shils’ papers in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago. He worked on the manuscript during the first half of the 1950s, but ceased in 1958. See his comments on Love, Belief, and Civility in Shils 2006a: 104–5. 6 For his criticisms of these categories, see, respectively, Shils 1954a; [1957] 1972a. 7 For Shils on Maine’s contrast between status and contract, see Shils 1991a. 8 The influence of Knight on Shils’ thought should not be underestimated. Not only was Knight the first translator of Max Weber’s works into English (General Economic History), but in 1936 he also conducted a seminar, of which Shils was a member, on Weber’s Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft at the University of Chicago. One consequence of recognizing the influence of the social process on the formation of the individual, shared by Knight and Shils, is that the principle of methodological individualism requires modification; see Shils 2006a: 140, 145, 205. For an attempt to modify the principle, see Grosby 2014: 122–45. 9 Shils had commented on a draft of Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge. His comments are especially obvious in Polanyi’s chapter on conviviality ([1958] 1964: 208, 210–11), with the paragraph that begins with the stylistically awkward ‘Meanwhile, I have yet to add an essential qualification to the principle of authority.’ The concerns of those paragraphs are quintessentially Shils, and the stylistic awkwardness of the beginning of that first paragraph likely indicates Polanyi’s insertion of Shils’ comments directly into the manuscript.

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The sociologist as human scientist: the meaning of Shils Thomas Schneider When Edward Shils died in 1995 at the age of 84, obituaries in newspapers from Bombay, London, and New York paid tribute to and praised his work (e.g. Béteille, 1995; Halsey, 1995; Saxon, 1995; Young, 1995). The Times wrote: ‘He is essentially an intellectual’s intellectual and scarcely a single corner of the Western cultural tradition has not benefited from the illumination afforded by his penetrating and often pungent attention’ (The Times, 1995: 23). The media accounts of his life and achievements were echoed by academic acknowledgements of his scholarship all over the world (e.g. De Kelaita, 1995; S. Turner, 1995; Grosby, 1996; Eisenstadt, 1997). Oddly enough, the quantity of recognition of Shils, who was invited to deliver the Jefferson Lecture from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1979 and who received the Balzan Prize in 1983 – a prize ‘awarded by an Italian foundation for fields without Nobel Prizes’ (Saxon, 1995: D 21) – did not correspond with his recognition in his own main field of research: the discipline of sociology. On the contrary. By the time of his death, Shils was unknown to younger researchers, his name was not mentioned in any of the then popular textbooks and introductions into the field, and although the American Sociological Association had already honoured him with its Career of Distinguished Scholarship award in 1986 – a prize ‘which he did not accept in person’ (Bulmer, 1996: 21) – there existed no comprehensive academic acknowledgement of his work in the classical form of receptions, monographs, biographical essays, and the like. It seemed that Shils, who, together with Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton, was a key figure in the foundation of what came to be called ‘modern’ sociological thinking (Parsons et al., 1961), and thus was declared an ‘academic high priest – at the very least a cardinal of the sociological orthodoxy’ (Lukes, 1978/79: 186) – had become a forgotten sociologist. However, there is life in the old dog yet. In this chapter, I will try to convey a very brief but comprehensive understanding of Shils’ thinking, which I have formulated more explicitly

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elsewhere (Schneider, 2016). My argument will unfold in three steps. First, I will follow the suggestion of one of the editors of this collection, that ‘Edward Shils was a widely recognized but misunderstood thinker’ (Turner, 1999: 125), while exploring some of the reasons for this misunderstanding. Second, and in contrast to the main lines of misunderstanding of his writings, I will suggest reading Shils from a specific standpoint, which one might call a human scientific approach. It will be shown that, paradoxically, although his writings circled around a phenomenon, still of significance for the discipline today: the understanding of what Shils called ‘the constitution of society’ (Shils, 1982a), Shils’ way of thinking needs to be understood by placing it outside the boundaries of sociological consciousness. In my opinion, Shils tried to solve a larger problem by analysing the genesis and dynamics of (conflicting) values in the process of human action. Eventually, I will conclude by reinterpreting Shils through placing his line of thought in the context of contemporary social theory and moral philosophy. My aim will be to portray Shils as a thinker who was concerned with what has been labelled ‘sacralization’ and ‘affirmative genealogy’ (Joas, 2013: 3–5), and to raise the question of whether secular humanism and the Abrahamic religions share a common perspective. Neglecting Shils What are the reasons for the neglect of Shils? I can see three major ones, which are closely connected with each other. One reason is, that in contrast to Talcott Parsons or Robert K. Merton, Shils never established a ‘school’ or institutional setting, nor did he willingly enlist ‘disciples’ to transmit his ideas. When Shils entered the academic scene, the University of Chicago – where Shils was trained theoretically and where he taught and lived up to the end – dominated the North American discipline of sociology from its beginning in the 1890s up to the mid-1930s. Things had changed dramatically by the time Shils became a well-known sociologist: It was Parsons who dominated Harvard after World War II and his students, like Merton …, who created the theoretical character of Columbia. As American sociology became the centre of prestige and power in Western sociology, Parsons and Harvard became the centre of American sociology in turn. (Alexander, 1987: 34–5)

Far be it from me to underestimate the actual role of Shils’ pupils, which he did have, and among them the best known are the late Joseph BenDavid and the late Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, in addition to many important others (including some of the contributors to this collection). But Shils did not have the assembly line that Merton and Parsons did. Nevertheless, key



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concepts of his still belong to the repertoire of the social sciences and are of concern to theoretical and empirical research (e.g. civility, centre/ periphery, intellectuals, ideology, tradition, deference, primordiality). And they demonstrate that Shils has been, in fact, much more influential than is apparent at first sight. As a consequence, with the sheer hegemony of the Parsons School in terms of the power to institute a paradigm shift through training students, and the institutional and material resources such as funds for huge empirical studies that existed at Columbia, it obviously was difficult for many to discern Shils as an independent figure of the same stature in North American sociology. A second reason for the neglect of Shils is what I call his very personal ‘working style’. He was co-founder of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist as well as founder and editor of the renowned journal Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning, and Policy; he was also a long-time member of the editorial board of the American Journal of Sociology and wrote on a regular basis for the American Sociological Review. Nonetheless, he seemed to be more interested in uncovering other people’s potential than to let his students invest their time in elaborating and applying his own theoretical concepts. Nor did he or his students dominate the professional organizations of sociology. As the British sociologist Martin Bulmer concluded: ‘Shils’ influence upon sociology lay through his teaching and his scholarship rather than through engagement in the activities of professional associations’ (Bulmer, 1996: 20). His high academic standards, together with his conservative attitude, which was fuelled by his temperament of Jewish and Eastern European origin, was not – especially in the politically heated atmosphere of the Cold War – received enthusiastically by everybody (Epstein, 1997: 10). In addition, the fact that his prose, often filigreed and without any complicated terminological constructions, was not supplied by enough references to reveal the sources of his legendary knowledge,1 also led to misunderstanding of his works (Turner, 1999: 127). The third reason for the neglect of Shils lies in a contradictory history of reception of his ideas. I will differentiate two major lines of interpretation here, which I will define as (a) the functionalist paradigm and (b) the practice-theoretical paradigm of his writings. I have no great quarrel with either of these interpretations. At a certain point, however, they overemphasize certain traditions, while omitting others, which they cannot integrate, and thus both remain reductive in their perspectives. One of the interpretations of Shils understands him as a mere follower of Parsons’ ideas and theoretical movement, which dominated American sociology from the Second World War until at least the mid-1960s and which was called ‘Structural-Functionalism’ (Alexander, 1987: 36).

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According to this line of interpretation, Shils, who collaborated on a number of books with Parsons right after the war (Parsons and Shils, 1951; Parsons et al., 1953), set out a too harmonious view on the functioning of society, based on the idea of a moral consensus, in which the prosperous development of the United States became a model of a proper post-war modern development, or even of ‘modernity’ as such. Following this line of argument, both Parsons and Shils were heavily criticized for having neglected such factors as conflict or social change in their theoretical approaches (Alexander, 1987: 111). From the point of view of a neo-utilitarian or vulgar-Marxist critic, Shils’ work therefore was ‘a considerable disservice to sociology to present our discipline as a useful handmaiden of the current effort to make a conservative ideology once more orthodox and unquestioned’ (Birnbaum 1955: 23). Even until the end of the 1970s Shils was thus seen by many sociologists as ‘a structural functionalist to the bone – and a high-level ideologist’ (Lukes 1978/79: 186). In contrast to Merton, however, Shils was never a pupil of Parsons, nor does one find in any of his several introductions or autobiographical essays a self-designation as functionalist. Surely, it would be quite misleading to state that Shils never ever adhered to any functionalist sort of thinking. But whereas Parsons today is seen from a wider perspective, as someone who has reached a level of thinking beyond mere structural functionalism, and whereas it is admitted that he was in search of an explanation of social order after the deprivations of the Great Depression in the 1930s and the horrors of the Second World War (Alexander, 1985: 7–18), the understanding of Shils as an orthodox conservative in political and theoretical terms seems to linger on (Birnbaum, 2000/2001). This is even more strange, since it is also accepted that Shils, in contrast to the former sociological mainstream never postulated an orthodox version of the so-called ‘Modernization Theory’, which resulted as a general narrative from Parsons and his Action Theory, whose overly suggestive and simple teleological motifs Shils always rejected (e.g. Shils, [1958d] 1997a; see also Knoebl, 2001: 228–32). A completely different view on Shils is expressed in a second line of interpretation, that, in contrast to the interpretation above, and truly in favour of his ideas, brings forward the argument that Shils is not at all to be understood by associating him either with American sociology in general or with Parsons’ theory in particular, and which instead suggests reading his works through a European, especially British tradition of thought. It was developed by Stephen Turner (1999). Turner sees Shils as a representative thinker of what he has named a ‘Social Theory of Practices’ (1994). He especially refers to the fact that Shils



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laid great emphasis on the role of ‘tradition’ for modern societies (Shils, 1981a), and argues for the recognition of Shils’ accounts for the double terminology of ‘ideology and civility’ and his analysis of the role of ‘in­tellectuals’ (Shils, [1958b] 1972a: 42–70). Hence, Turner tries to trace Shils’ thoughts back to the 1930s and 1940s debates in London in which, according to him, such different thinkers as Michael Oakeshott, T. S. Eliot, Michael Polanyi, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, J. P. Mayer, Isaiah Berlin, and Christopher Dawson, together with Shils, regularly took part. Turner states that, in this loose circle of thinkers, a genuine AngloSaxon defence of liberal democracy against the creeping dangers of both Fascism and Communism and against the growing sympathies of in­tellectuals for these ideologies evolved, which justifies reanimating Shils’ basic ideas in order to confront contemporary social thought: Shils’ theoretical concerns can be located within twentieth-century thought in a way that we can see their historical kinship with the concerns of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault, the twin Gods of present-day social theory. Understood in the right context, the context of European social and political thought, Shils is the representative—and perhaps the sole representative, with the possible exception of Ernest Gellner—of a fully developed social theoretical defence of liberal democracy, a defence that is comparable to the critiques of liberal democracy found in Foucault and Habermas. (Turner, 1999: 127)

For Turner, it is this context of classical political thought that ‘separated [Shils] from American academic sociology and from thinkers of a different kind, like Parsons, for whom this question never arose’ (Turner, 1999: 128). He therefore concludes that Shils’ way of thinking cannot be understood clearly without registering his underlying normative perspective on analysing modern society, and argues that ‘It is a picture of society that is at odds with Parsons’ (Turner, 1999: 135). As fascinating as Turner’s interpretation sounds – is it really plausible that Shils’ thought runs counter to any American tradition of social and political thought per se? Turner provides evidence that Shils has been ignored widely in American sociology, whereas his legacy remains in the British discipline, where his thoughts and achievements seem to be recognized to a much larger degree: ‘No one did more than he to encourage the development of sociology in Britain’ (Halsey, 1995: G2 16). This is the case for his time at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he lectured from 1945 onwards, thus establishing a transatlantic scholarship that lasted until the end of his life. The marks he made upon LSE’s staff as well as its disciplinary curriculum have been well documented (e.g. Bulmer, 1985; Dahrendorf, 1995).

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According to the novelist and Nobel Prize-winner Saul Bellow – first protégé, then friend and finally colleague – Shils was best characterized by his ‘Weimar-style toughness’ as well as the circumstance that he ‘had also modelled himself on English dons and in time became a don himself’ (Bellow, 2000: 131–2).2 What seems even more significant than this observation is the fact that Shils became an important figure in the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, where he soon belonged to its ‘herd of independent minds’ (Rosenberg, 1948), together with personalities such as Mircea Eliade, David Grene, Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom, and Hannah Arendt, among others, which consolidated the impression that Shils might be more of a philosophical thinker or public intellectual than a pure American sociologist. On the other hand, Shils explicitly wrote for a sociologically interested public and from an early stage dialogically communicated between both the American and the British disciplines. Thus, his writings were ‘intended to help bridge the gap … between Europe and America in the field of sociological studies’, as well as ‘to help British and European sociologists to benefit by what is fruitful in American sociological research and to avoid the repetition of its errors’ (Shils, 1948: 1). Furthermore, it could be asserted that, especially in the United States from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, there was a turn to an autonomous American philosophical tradition, which also focused on ‘practices’ in a broader sense of the term, and with established genuine normative implications, which Turner, in his interpretation as a possible source of influence on Shils, however, does not even mention: pragmatism. Ultimately, at the University of Chicago and in the Midwest, under the influence of the ideas of George H. Mead, John Dewey, William James, and Charles S. Peirce, social scientists such as Charles H. Cooley, William I. Thomas, Louis Wirth, Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and others manifested pioneering methodological works in the so-called ‘Chicago School’ (Bulmer, 1984) which can be, in fact, interpreted as a transformation of pragmatist social and political thought in American sociology (Joas, 1993: 14). The fact that Shils, who was a pupil of Park and had studied with Burgess and Wirth, was an admirer as well as a critic of the Chicago School (Shils, 1981b, 1991b) proves, in my opinion, his close attachment to the University of Chicago and to at least some of its traditions. As we can now see, both lines of interpretation – the functionalist as well as the practice-theoretical paradigm of an understanding of Shils’ writings – are not consistent with each other and thus remain insufficient. Whereas the first one de facto stands still in history by criticizing Shils as a follower of a former dominant theoretical movement in American



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sociology, while ignoring his writings after that period, the other one simply denies the possibility that Shils might be understood from another than a European, respectively British perspective. Therefore, the possibility of understanding Shils as an independent thinker is rendered impossible. The result may be that some of his concepts may be broken from the larger whole, which helps the production of theoretical and scholarly myths and leads to a loss of recognition of Shils’ authorship of key ideas – a process for which Merton once invented the prominent phrase ‘obliteration by incorporation’ (Merton, 1949: 27–8). Shils’ basic view of society As opposed to the main lines of understanding of his writings, it is my goal in the following to historicize Shils’ basic view on society and to propose a more extensive outline of his work. Shils once dated the beginning of his more systematic thinking back to 1935 (Shils, 1988a). Essentially, this date is less accidental than it might seem. Although Shils did not reveal why this certain date should be seen as a starting point of his thinking, I can see three reasons. First of all, this date may be interpreted as referring to the end of the Chicago School of sociology, symbolically manifested in the retirement of Robert E. Park, who, together with Frank H. Knight – expert on the works of Max Weber – and Harold D. Lasswell – pragmatist-inspired political scientist and psychoanalyst – Shils always referred to as his major teachers at the University of Chicago (e.g. Shils 1981b: 179–81, 1982a: vii, xxix).3 In fact, the year 1935 also designates the beginning of some major and lasting disputes about the Chicago School’s development in theoretical and methodological terms within the Department of Sociology, one result of which might have been that Shils was appointed first in the College and then in the Committee on Social Thought, thus being ‘marginalized’ at the department (Abbott and Gaziano, 1999: 38). Second, 1935 marks the beginning of Shils’ contact with European intellectuals – initially undertaken for a research project as an assistant to Louis Wirth – as well as his lifelong preoccupation with the European classics of sociology, which he began to translate and thus popularize in the United States, and that led to his first publication (Wirth and Shils, 1935). Finally, the mid-1930s was the time of Shils’ very first encounter with Parsons, who presented his Structure of Social Action in Chicago in the summer of 1936 (Shils, 1981b: 190–1), and thanked Shils for his comments on it in his preface (Parsons, [1937] 1968: vii). Given the fact that Shils also

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knew the writings of Merton, from at least 1935 on,4 this year also marks the beginning of a common interest of all three thinkers in systematic theorizing and theoretical exchange that led to future co-operation. As far as I can see, there is only one publication in which Shils critically relates his thoughts to both the theories of Parsons and Merton on one side and where he presented his own views in a clear-cut opposition to both of them on the other. I refer here to his essay ‘The Calling of Sociology’ (Shils, 1961a), which first appeared as an epilogue to the two volumes Theories of Society, edited by Parsons and others, alongside other contributions, and, as the subheading illustrates, basic Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory of that time (Parsons et al., 1961). In this essay, which, given its language and length, truly can be read as a sociological manifesto, Shils explores his vision of sociology as a human science. According to Shils, it was the wide distribution of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis as well as the pioneering work of Talcott Parsons which helped to establish sociology as a widely recognized scientific discipline after the Second World War (Shils, 1961a: 1406). Shils points to Parsons’ Structure, in which he interpreted the works of mainly European thinkers such as Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto, and Alfred Marshall, and synthesized their thoughts into a specific framework – a common concept of human action: It was this work that brought the greatest of the partial traditions into a measure of unity. It precipitated the sociological outlook that had been implicit in the most interesting of the empirical inquiries; it made explicit the affinities and complementarity of the sociological traditions that had arisen out of utilitarianism, idealism, and positivism. It redirected sociology into its classical path, and, in doing so, it began the slow process of bringing into the open the latent dispositions that had underlain the growth of sociological curiosity. Abstract and complicated though its argument was, The Structure of Social Action laid out the main lines of the concrete sociological outlook that has come forward in academic study and in the public appreciation of sociology since its appearance. (Shils, 1961a: 1406–7)

Although Shils reveals the commonalities between his works and those of Parsons and Merton in terms of systematizing classical sociological concepts, he also makes clear where differences between all three arise, especially when it comes to the question of which way the sociological discipline can be understood as a result of the scientific age. For Shils, the ‘problems of sociology are older problems; at least the fundamental problems are older than the scientific age’. Therefore, he concludes, the discipline has benefited from its general principles ‘to its advantage and disadvantage’ (Shils, 1961a: 1412). The disadvantages are manifested in the concern of ‘technological sociology’, which he associates both with the Marxist and



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positivistic tendencies in the sociological writings of that time (Shils, 1961a: 1421). In contrast to Parsons and Merton, who developed their theories in close orientation towards the natural sciences and who both draw on the ideas of the Harvard mathematician and philosopher of science Alfred N. Whitehead (see Wenzel, 1990: 157), Shils tells an alternative story of what he sees as the precursors of the sociological discipline. In the section which follows, entitled ‘Sociology and the Humanistic Study of Man’, Shils points to the relevance and significance of the humanities, which, according to him, have helped to develop a certain sociological outlook: Individuality, creativity, strength and force of character, are just as much the proper themes and problems of sociological inquiry as they are of humanistic study … [S]ociology and humanistic disciplines are bound together by an indissoluble tie. This is the tie of their common subject matter and the shared appreciation of the human qualities of the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic powers that constitute the humanity of their subject matter. … Sociology is humanistic because it attempts to understand whatever man does, in categories that acknowledge his humanity: his need for cognitive orientation; his capacity for rational judgment and action, for affectionate attachment, for aesthetic expression and response, for moral decision. … The great traditions of sociology are humanistic; and the general sociological theory and the sociological orientation that represent the present phase of those traditions continue and make more articulate their humanism. (Shils, 1961a: 1415, 1417)

For Shils, who, according to Eisenstadt, came ‘to social science through literature’ (quoted by Epstein, 1997: 7), the sources of sociology comprise also such different traditions and fields of thought such as classical philosophical thinking from Greek antiquity, theology, Renaissance humanism, French moralism, idealism, Darwinism, social anthropology, and psycho­ analysis, among others. Therefore he interprets the establishment of sociology as a scientific discipline as part of an ongoing process of man’s will to understand himself: Sociological analysis is a continuation in a contemporary idiom of the great efforts of the human mind to render judgment on man’s vicissitudes on earth. It springs from an aspiration ultimately as profound as, if less farreaching than, theology … . The dominant sociological theory of the present century has sought to transcend the local and periodic and to enter into a more trans-historical stratum of being. Is this not what the moral philosophers have sought to do? Is the oracular ‘know thyself’ a recommendation to understand one’s self as a particular bundle of motives and powers, alive in a Greek polis; or did it command those who read it to understand themselves as men? (Shils, 1961a: 1417–18)

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A sociologist’s role, as Shils understands it, is to reveal and articulate the growth of human empathy, and the ‘appreciation of the moral dignity’ of human beings (Shils, 1961a: 1410), as well as the processes of social and cultural ‘integration’ which he sees in the ‘still small, but nonetheless real and growing, respect for the rights of Negroes, African and American; the increased responsiveness to the human claims of women and children – indeed, the very idea of the welfare state and the right of every miserable creature among us to such happiness as this vale of tears allows’ (Shils, 1961a: 1429). Sociology seen in this way is called ‘consensual sociology’, but with a meaning that Shils indicates by referring to the ideas of Charles H. Cooley (Shils, 1961a: 1440). The section ‘The Prospect of Sociological Theory – The Agenda’ thereafter entails four steps, with which Shils intends to advance sociological theory and research. First, he argues for a new scientific vocabulary, drawing on Max Weber and a more historically and comparatively oriented analysis of Western and non-Western societies, for which he proposes to use the terms ‘centre and periphery’ (Shils, 1961a: 1442–3). Second, he criticizes contemporary sociology for having neglected the construction of a theory of change. He instead promotes consideration of the ‘temporal’ and suggests putting such diverse fields of interest such as ‘the study of power, of class structure, and of values’ together in order to construct a ‘macrosociology’ able to understand ‘why and how one type of society yields place to another, or why one type of society passes through one, rather than another, of alternative sets of sequences’ (Shils, 1961a: 1443–4). Third, Shils pleads to give ‘tradition’ a more prominent status in sociological analysis in favour of explaining both, the genesis and durability of culture in contemporary societies. Here he confronts the dominant functionalist paradigm with its own standards of research and with its actual failures to reach these standards in a seldom articulated directness: Two decades of concern with ‘personality and culture’ have passed with little consolidation of advantage. Now the danger is that what was once an object of passionate enthusiasm will fall into that oblivion into which disagreeable and scantily fruitful experiences are consigned, and that nothing will remain of either the interest or the task it posited. There was a real, if misformulated, problem at the bottom of that interest of the ’thirties and ’forties of the present century. One of the reasons for the failure to do justice to the task was the incapacity of sociologists to deal with the phenomenon of culture and to draw the line between it and the personality system … . Sociology has thus far not assimilated—although strivings are already apparent—the conventional geisteswissenschaftliche analysis of the realm of symbolic forms, of the ‘objectivations’ of culture. The dynamic properties



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of symbolic systems must be understood, not only for the study of the spheres of cultural creation, more narrowly conceived, such as the development of painting or music or theology, but for the wider reaches of culture, such as moral standards and religious belief. (Shils, 1961a: 1444–5)

For Shils, closely connected with this point is, at last, the need of sociological theory to take into account the significance of religion. He also refers to two thinkers, who, according to him, have been most occupied with the task of examining the close relationship of the ‘secular’ and the ‘sacred’ in society, and who he suggests consulting for future analysis – Max Weber and Émile Durkheim: Finally, the agenda of sociological theory must find a place for religion. I do not mean the study of ecclesiastical institutions, or of the influence of beliefs about God’s intentions on daily conduct, of church attendance, or attitudes toward priests. These are all interesting subjects, and there are many more like them in the sociological study of religion. What I have in mind is a much more elusive and much more fundamental matter. Sociologists are accustomed to and take for granted the distinction between sacred and secular. It is an inheritance from our Western religious and political traditions and, more specifically, of our sociological tradition. It has been accepted without question; but it is now time to re-examine it. The re-examination should not be regarded as an attempt to establish a theocracy or a state church, to argue on behalf of the truth of any theology, or even to argue that the piety of the masses is conducive to social order. These arguments vary from the obnoxious to ridiculous, and they have nothing whatsoever to do with the proposal that sociology concern itself with the ways in which man’s need for being in contact with the sacred or charismatic things manifests itself in politics, in the legal system, in education and learning, as well as in the churches. Both Durkheim and Weber had a wonderful sense of this phenomenon, but this aspect of their understanding of society has not been taken up. The time is now ripe. (Shils, 1961a: 1445)

In the section entitled ‘The Progress of Sociological Theory and the Permanent Relevance of the Classics’, Shils clarifies his views on the heritage of sociology, and thus demonstrates why he constantly and thoroughly read the classics of sociology over and over again in order to systematize their thoughts and to incorporate their ideas into his very own terminology (1961a: 1446–8), an effort which, ironically, rendered it rather difficult to discern major influences on his work, given the sheer amount of literature he consumed over time (Shils, 1975a: xxv; 1982a: xxix–xxx). It should now be evident how the approaches of all three sociologists – of Parsons, Merton, and Shils – differed from each other. Whereas all three agree on the vision of synthesizing the sociological classics in a framework of human action, their approaches spring from quite different

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perspectives. Both Parsons and Merton draw on models of natural sciences for their approaches. Whereas Merton, through his custom of quantifying and empiricizing sociological concepts, nourished the impression that the classics as such should play a minor role, once being synthesized successfully, Parsons, depending on Whitehead’s concept of ‘analytic realism’, simply excluded rather ambivalent thinkers such as Georg Simmel from his frame of reference by declaring him an ‘essayist’ (Parsons, [1937] 1968: xiv, n10; see, for a critic, Levine, 1991). In contrast with Parsons and Merton, Shils draws on the humanities and models his theory on the classics in a more dialogical form. Therefore, he cannot be completely understood without taking into account the more pragmatist methodological traditions of his Chicago heritage (e.g. Garfinkel et al., 1981: 133; Shils, 1982a: xxviii), which led him to construct a framework of collective action that cannot be interpreted as simply functionalist (Joas, 1996). Shils’ understanding of values and norms As I will try to show very briefly, Shils had a much better sense of understanding the dynamic role played by values and norms in the process of human action and in the constitution of society as well as of the persistence of ideological traditions in modernity than either Parsons or Merton. One way to explicate the rather unamenable terminology of Shils is to compare his thoughts with contemporary social theory and the concern of moral philosophy. For Shils, from a very early stage of his thinking onwards, it was clear that ‘men evaluate the objects, acts, and human attributes with which they come into contact’ (Shils and Goldhamer, [1939] 1975a: 245). As laid out in a couple of publications (e.g. Shils, [1957] 1975a: 111–26, [1965] 1975a: 256–75), he observes a close connection between identity building and the genesis of values, which can be defined as follows: ‘values arise in experiences of self-formation and self-transcendence’ (Joas, 2000: 1). As Shils states, ‘the need which human beings have for incorporation into something which transcends and transfigures their concrete individual existence’ is an anthropological phenomenon and, as such, universal (Shils, [1961] 1982a: 98). It is important to register, of course, that Shils, who declared himself as a ‘consensual pluralist’ from the mid-1930s on (Shils, 1982a: x), also describes the role of values in the process of human action from a valueneutral position as well as emphasizes the compound character of values. This led him to speak rather of ties or attachments, and that explains his lasting interest in tradition (e.g. Shils, 1988b). For Shils, human action



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takes place in such traditions, to which humans relate in an evaluative mode (Shils, [1961] 1982a: 93–109). The very notion of centre and periphery and the inherent antagonism between them exemplifies this tension between ‘social’ and ‘system integration’, the discussion of which became prominent in the sociological period that followed the Parsonian hegemony (Alexander, 1987: 129). According to Shils, ‘the central value system is the central zone of the society. It is central because of its intimate connection with what the society holds to be sacred’ (Shils, [1961] 1982a: 95). Therefore, his sociological studies – from his early analysis of deference, to the study of social cohesion and disintegration in the German Wehrmacht, the study of dynamics of prejudices, the disputes with Critical Theory about authoritarianism and mass culture, his studies of intellectuals and their creative role in the constitution of society as well as their predilection for ideology, his analysis of secrecy in the McCarthy era, the study of the coronation of Elizabeth II to his analysis of the transformations of non-Western societies – can all be interpreted as studies on ‘sacralization’, a term he frequently used (Shils, 2006a: 87). It should be made clear of course, that Shils, who as a scientist analysed society from the standpoint of a ‘pious agnostic’ (Epstein, 1997: 28), was referring to the term in its religious meaning as well as its secular content (see also Joas, 2013: 5). For Shils, therefore, the analysis of ‘cultural objectivations’ – or the transhistorical ‘conversation about values in society’ (Joas, 2000: 186) – refers to historically contingent innovations such as the codifications of the value of human dignity in human rights (Joas, 2013). According to Shils, the calling of sociology was also intimately involved in the development of a normative perspective on the tendencies that endanger modern society. This is why he redefines the term ‘mass society’ against the Cassandra of Critical Theory: I use [the term mass society] with much misgiving because it has cognitive and ethical overtones which are repugnant to me. Yet, since it has the merit of having focused attention on a historically and sociologically very significant phase of modern society, and since it is the resultant analysis which I wish to correct, I shall go on using the term, while trying not to be a captive of the problems and categories which it carries with it. (Shils, [1961] 1980a: 71)

Rather than renew the old battle between religion and the Enlightenment, Shils thus suggests that ‘[w]e must rediscover the permanently valid element in our historical ideals’ (Shils 1955a: 57).5 It is this vision of Shils’ that justifies, as opposed to all claims of a ‘clash of civilizations’, a moral universalism against ‘anti-universalism such as an increasingly rampant

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anti-Islamism’ (Joas, 2014: 134), as well as a defence of a liberal democratic attitude against all anti-humanism, such as the new forms of ‘populism’ (see Knoebl, 2016/17). Notes 1 According to Thomas S. Kuhn, ‘Edward Shils … has apparently read everything’ (Kuhn, 1979: vii). The range of Shils’ interest covered such different fields as sociology, philosophy, economics, history, law, religion, and orientalism, and may be retraced even today in his 16,000 books, some of them quite rare, which emerged in the inventory of the University of Erfurt’s library after his death (e.g. www.uni-erfurt.de/bibliothek/ub/ueber-die-ub/bestand/samm/ bibliothek-edward-shils/). 2 The relationship between Shils and Bellow, who drafted several pictures of Shils’ personality in a couple of novels, must also be read as a very specific teacher–pupil relationship (e.g. Epstein 1997: 2–3; Atlas, 2000: 390–1; Staples, 2000). 3 In an unpublished document, entitled ‘The Theory of Society of the Chicago School of Sociology’, Shils wrote about Park: ‘When Park left the University of Chicago …, the sun was removed from the heavens. That was the end of the Chicago School of sociology.’ Edward Shils Papers, Department of Special Collections, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Box 47, p. 1. 4 Both Merton and Shils read and commented on Parsons’ Structure before it was published. It is still not clear, however, since when Merton and Shils had known each other personally. Both were born in 1910 and grew up in Philadelphia. Shils quoted Merton in his first co-publication with Wirth in 1935 (Wirth and Shils, 1935: 465). Even Merton, when asked, could not – ‘with no diary or journal to stimulate the memory I do have’ – answer the question of when both had met for the first time (Robert K. Merton, e-mail to Thomas Schneider, New York, 3 August 2001). 5 As opposed to Pooley (2007), I argue that it is this sort of ‘affirmative genealogy’ and a specific usage of the ‘sociology of knowledge’ that contradict the notion of an assumed ‘turn’ of Shils against Karl Mannheim, as well as a postulated European way of critique of mass society as such. If at all in Shils’ writings may be identified a turn, then it is the one against structural functionalism and orthodox modernization theory, which evolved out of the ‘Congress for Cultural Freedoms’ debates about ideology, mass society and modernity in the 1950s. See, e.g., Shils, 1955a; see also now MacLeod, 2016.

3

The recovery of tradition Lenore T. Ealy

Behind the contemporary crisis of community lies a long history of the slow but inexorable destruction of the traditional communities in the West. Robert Nisbet, Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary (1982: 51) Contrary to modernist assertions, traditional architecture does not embody a historic/archaic (i.e. past) knowledge but technical know-how essentially related to the human condition. Léon Krier, The Architecture of Community (2009: 251) The conditions of community are met when consensus prevails about the common knowledge, shared communities of understanding, and patterns of accountability to such a degree that mutual trust prevails among those participating in such communities of relationships. These are the ‘stocks’ necessary to complement the ‘flows’ of information and activities characteristic of ways of life in human societies. Vincent Ostrom, The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies (1997: 291)

Introduction: the problem of tradition In 1981, Edward Shils published Tradition, a book that opens with the statement: ‘This book about tradition is evidence of the need for tradition.’ Shils reports that he began thinking about the problem of tradition as early as 1956 in his seminars at the University of Chicago, and that the opportunity to deliver the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at the University of Kent in 1974 helped him deepen his reflections on the subject. He revised these lectures many times, and they took shape as the ten chapters of the book he ultimately published (1981a: vii). In taking up a deep study of the meaning of tradition and its role in society, Shils offered his readers illuminating and important insights that can continue to help us reframe one of the chief tensions we experience as inhabitants of the modern age, that between reason and tradition. Sometimes manifesting as almost Manichaean contests between good and evil in our current intellectual life and

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our politics, the longstanding tensions between traditionality and rationality continue to compromise our ability to solve social problems. Shils’ treatment of tradition reminds us that ‘the permanent task’ of humankind is to solve problems for which there can be no permanent solutions, and that for this we need both reason and tradition, each properly understood, readily at hand (1981a: 323). The problem of tradition in modern communities is largely inseparable from the problem of authority. In forming associations – whether, on Michael Oakeshott’s terms, they seek to form a civic association (a polity) or an enterprise association (a firm, a club, or a scientific or literary community) – people are both granting some authority over themselves to the associative body and establishing a pattern of interaction that may, if it serves its purpose well, be handed down to future generations. Even when people come together in merely transactional modes, for simple exchanges of economic goods or social pleasantries, they are most successful when they submit to the authority of prevailing customary norms of the market, the tavern, and the public square in which they meet. The possibility of a pure anarchy, a life in which the individual is subject to no authority but his or her own, is a romantic fiction. Humans are born helpless; for our very survival we depend upon others who themselves participate in intergenerational traditions of nurture, education, and socialization. Despite our necessary reliance on received patterns of ordering our ways of life, the transition from the medieval to the modern world saw people raise challenges on an unprecedented scale to a wide variety of particular traditions and to the authority of tradition itself. We are familiar with these dramas that played out across the institutional landscape of early modern Europe. Protestant Reformers challenged the tradition and authority of papal government in the Church. In promulgating new interpretations of their ‘divine right’, kings challenged the traditional rights of the feudal estates. Renaissance scholarship precipitated quarrels between the Ancients and the Moderns. A new breed of empirical scientists challenged the subordination of scientific investigation to the Inquisition.1 In his Novum Organum (1620), Francis Bacon gave voice to the growing hope for scientific progress in the new modern age, a progress that could be made only if it could be wrested from the suffocations of tradition: with a regard to authority, it shows a feeble mind to grant so much to authors and yet deny time his rights, who is the author of authors, nay, rather of all authority. For rightly is truth called the daughter of time, not of authority. It is no wonder therefore if those enchantments of antiquity and authority and consent have so bound up men’s powers that they have been made impotent (like persons bewitched) to accompany with the nature of things. (Bacon, 1620: 81)



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As the Enlightenment dawned in full, reformers in many arenas embraced the hopeful vision that it would be possible to work out material and moral improvements in human life. Not only would new knowledge in the natural sciences help humanity achieve increasing technological mastery, but new learning and new techniques of what August Comte called ‘social physics’ were hailed as means to improve social, political, and economic conditions. By the early twentieth century, after two centuries of positivism, progressivism, socialism, political revolution, and a devastating world war, there were many who continued to view tradition as an unwonted drag on the pursuit of progress. In an essay first composed as an address to the American Economic Association in 1934, Frank H. Knight pointed out the dangers that accompanied ‘the common delusion that by the happy discovery of some formula, it may be possible to change the character and constitution of a society in a way comparable to the modern development of technology through science’. Knight cautioned that ‘the two problems are utterly different, and the natural consequence of any such a belief is to create a danger of social disintegration and the destruction of culture and life’ (Knight, 1935: 340). By the time Shils published Tradition (1981a), he could observe that the ‘acknowledged normative power of a past practice, arrangement, or belief has become very faint, indeed, it is almost extinguished as an intellectual argument’. Tradition was in ‘disrepute’, its authority having given way in the modern age, Shils stated, to ‘efficiency, rationality, expediency, “up-todateness,” or progressiveness’ (1981a: 1). There had emerged around the modern sciences a ‘penumbral scientistic tradition regarding the redemptive powers of scientific knowledge and the scientific attitude’ (1981a: 23). Partisans of the progressive outlook had come to look upon substantive traditions as an obstacle to the inexorable advance of science and the application of reason to human affairs (1981a: 21, 7). Their disdain extended to traditionality itself, what Shils describes as an orientation of appreciation of the wisdom of the past and the desire to utilize the past as a legitimate guide to present action. In regarding traditionality as the nemesis of rationalized social progress, however, it seemed to Shils that those of the progressive outlook had neglected to perceive the inescapable traditionality of science itself. The social sciences, moreover, in adopting ahistorical structuralist approaches to their subject matter, had largely blinded themselves to tradition. Shils’ recognition in Tradition of the problems of the scientistic outlook echoed not only the insights of Knight, who had been his colleague at the University of Chicago, but also shared common points of concern with the effort F. A. Hayek had made to differentiate the methodologies

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of the natural and social sciences. In The Counter-Revolution of Science ([1952] 1979), Hayek distinguished between a properly scientific inquiry and a scientistic one, which inappropriately tried to utilize the objective methods developed in the biological and physical sciences to study the subjective data with which the social and human sciences properly deal (Hayek, [1952] 1979: 37–45). Both Hayek’s and Shils’ criticisms of scientism also resonate with the work of Michael Polanyi on the transmission of authority in the natural sciences. In Science, Faith, and Society (1946b), Polanyi had proposed that science was itself a tradition comprising practical patterns of action and moral and spiritual premises and that it could be sustained only by self-awareness of the substantive content of its own tradition (Polanyi, 1946b: 54). Pointing out these resonances here is not to trace genealogical influence (though Shils’ did acknowledge an intellectual debt to Polanyi), but to establish a broader intellectual context in which Shils’ effort to restore and resolve the visibility of tradition in the social sciences makes a significant contribution.2 The meaning of tradition In setting out on this project Shils noted that though there were many works available on particular traditions, there was none available to him that took up a deeper sociological inquiry into the understanding of the things handed down from one generation to another. It will help us understand the scope and depth of Shils’ approach to this seemingly blank canvas if we start where Shils did, by consulting Max Weber. In Economy and Society,3 Weber proposed that social action could be oriented in four ways: instrumentally rational (relying on ends-means logic); value-rational (embodying the expression of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other type value worth pursuing for its own sake); affectual (arising from the emotional state of the actor); and traditional (‘determined by ingrained habituation’). In associating traditional action with habituation, Weber suggests that it comes close to being reactive behaviour and ‘very close to the borderline of what can justifiably be called meaningfully oriented action’ (Weber, [1968] 1978: 24–5). Shils saw Weber, the ‘greatest of all sociologists’, as unable to transcend his analysis of the progressive character of rationalization, which held that attachment to tradition would be gradually displaced by the expanding rationalization of social action. Modern societies would come, through a seemingly inexorable linear development, to be characterized by a state of ‘traditionlessness in which interest pursued with the aid of reason is the predominant ground of action and tradition only a survival unfitting to the style of such a modern society’ (Shils, 1981a: 9–10).



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If the Enlightenment spirit of the sciences and the developmentalist framework of sociology relegated tradition to the shadows of the past, the rising quest for personal autonomy further encouraged the neglect of tradition. Shils takes note of a ‘movement of the mind’ in Western societies that sought actively to reject the offerings of cultural traditions. This was a ‘metaphysical dread of being encumbered by something alien to oneself’. The works of authors such as D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, as well as the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis, signalled the emergence of a new Zeitgeist that sought to dispense with Victorian morality, bourgeois virtue, and the impositions of norms and knowledge by families, schools, and universities (Shils, 1981a: 12). It was apparent by the 1930s both that the rationalization of society could be problematic and that tradition would not so easily retire from the battlefield of authority over human action. Despite growing ambition for directing social change, rapid and experimental social innovations could be more disorienting than liberating for most people. The tensions in Western societies must have been palpable in those years that saw the end of a world war, a troubling peace settlement, and the beginning of a global economic crisis. Yet reform-oriented philosophers, from the Fabians to the Frankfurt School to the dark tide of rising Fascism, tried to take stock of the situation and illuminate the best paths to continue the march to progress. Shils takes note especially of the proposition of Karl Mannheim that contemporary tensions were generated by the ‘simultaneity of the unsimultaneous’. The coexistence of things from different ages caused confusion, and the ideal would be to create a ‘pastless culture’ with ‘pastless institutions’. Mannheim’s assumptions were troubling to Shils. On what grounds did he assume that ideas and institutions from the past would be wrong compared to more recent ideas and institutions? What sort of human beings could create such a pastless present? What sort of political force would be required to conduct such obliteration of the past (1981a: 38–9)? Shils’ pursuit of the meaning of tradition thus begins with a challenge both to the analytical traditions of his own profession and to the cultural visions of the inter-war social and political reformers to which others were returning for inspiration after the Second World War. ‘What looks, to those who have “joined” an avant-garde, like a wholly new program’, wrote Shils, ‘is never as comprehensively new as they imagine’ (1981a: 39–40). In contrast to the modern avant-garde, Shils sought to confront the reality that we are always ‘in the grip of the past’: If we could imagine a society in which each generation created all that it used, contemplated, enjoyed, and suffered, we would be imagining a society unlike any which has ever existed. It would be a society formed from a state

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of nature. It would literally be a society without a past to draw on to guide its actions in the present. (1981a: 34)

To account for the reality of the presence of the past, Shils needed to reconceive the substance of tradition as something other than mere habituated actions or reactions. Contrary to Weber’s view of tradition as near the far edge of meaningfully oriented action, Shils builds up layer by layer a nuanced description of tradition as an essential means of conveyance of meaning from the past to the present. Particular concrete actions are performed, not transmitted, and once performed, an action ceases to exist. Tradition, therefore does not describe a type of action. Rather, Shils proposes, a tradition comprises a pattern of actions. What can be transmitted from the past to the present are ‘the patterns or images of actions which they imply or present and the beliefs requiring, recommending, regulating, permitting, or prohibiting the reenactment of those patterns’ (1981a: 12). Essential within this conception of tradition is the action of re-enacting. A tradition requires custodians, and, as such, traditions are inherently patterns that elicit not merely reactive behaviour but meaningful human action. ‘Only living, knowing, desiring human beings’, writes Shils, ‘can enact them and re-enact them and modify them. Traditions develop because the desire to create something truer and better or more convenient is alive in those who acquire and possess them’ (1981a: 14–15). But, Shils reminds us, the ‘reenactment is not the tradition; the tradition is the pattern which guides the reenactment’ (1981a: 31). Traditions are also both stable and adaptable. Shils proposes that for a pattern of action to be considered a tradition and not merely a fleeting fad, a fashion, or in today’s conception, a meme, it must catch on intergenerationally.4 In considering the distinction between a fad and a tradition, one might consider the distinction between the tradition of presenting gifts to children on Christmas Day and the mimetic frenzy of a few years ago when Tickle Me Elmo was the gift to present, or the emerging fashion of presenting gift cards in lieu of personally chosen gifts. Shils’ presentation here seems to prove its helpfulness in evaluating the substance and vitality of a tradition. When we get into the spirit of what he proposes, we readily begin to consider questions about patterns of action that we have previously taken for granted. Sticking with the thoughts about gift-giving, we might begin to wonder whether the commercialization of Christmas gift exchanges hollows out the spiritual significance of the holiday, or whether the further monetization of gift exchange represented by the increasing exchange of gift cards hollows out the deeper and more intersubjective personal recognition embodied in the Christmas gift.



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That traditions in fact do change in such dynamic ways, however, also reflects their adaptability. In many spheres of human endeavour where originality is valued, such as the arts, literature, and the pursuit of scientific discovery, tradition acts not as a command but as a starting point. While there are traditions, such as those in morality and religious practice where the normative element within the tradition is a prominent feature, traditions are inevitably re-enacted in circumstances that may require them to be adapted to changes in the environment of action. Very few traditions should be treated by the careful analyst as a normative gestalt. ‘At every point in time in the course of its growth,’ writes Shils, ‘a tradition of belief or rules of conduct is an amalgam of persistent elements, and increments and innovations which have become part of it’ (1981a: 44). All the same, custodians of traditions can and do sometimes treat traditions as all-or-nothing wholes, at the risk of hardening them into patterns of traditionalism. In contrast to traditionality, which is an appreciative openness to the reception of traditions, traditionalism endows attachment to a tradition with a sacred character. Traditionalism can be revivalist and enthusiastic, dogmatic and doctrinaire. ‘It insists’, as Shils notes, ‘on thoroughgoing adherence; it does not discriminate between the workable and the unworkable and regards all elements of the tradition it praises as equally essential’ (Shils, [1958d] 1997a: 121). (Of course, one can surmise that the shift from traditionality to traditionalism would not happen or persist without being situated in a broader pattern of meaning that may itself have roots in tradition.) As Shils builds up a picture of what a tradition is (a transmittable pattern that guides re-enactment) and is not (a sentiment, a rational judgement, an action, a perception, a prayer, a scientific proposition, a process of industrial production, an exercise of authority, or a ritual performance), one begins to sense the inescapability of tradition (1981a: 31). As Shils puts it, ‘no generation, even those living in this present time of unprecedented dissolution of tradition, creates its own belief, apparatus, patterns of conduct and institutions. . . . No matter how talented it is, how imaginative and inventive, how frivolous and antinomian on a large scale, it creates only a very small part of what it uses and of what constitutes it’ (1981a: 38). Finally, lest we begin to think that the best we can do in light of the inevitability of escaping tradition is to live traditionally, that is ‘to reconstruct a past pattern of life … to use it as a model for a specific reconstruction of the immediate environment of present activities’, Shils points out that a nostalgic sense of longing for the past, though common, is not the best approach to tradition. This sort of pragmatic (as opposed to sacralized) traditionality is also unlikely to succeed at easing our qualms. The human condition is one in which the precipitates of continuous traditions

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and the exigencies of our current environments coexist and must be faced together (1981a: 54). The endurance of the past With tradition established as a pattern of action transmitted by reenactment by human beings, Shils proceeds in the bulk of Tradition to explore how traditions can be discerned in the endurance of past objects (Chapter 2) and the endurance of past practices (Chapter 3). Historiography, which is the effort to establish or revise images of what happened in the past, has a role to play here, but it must be clear about its subject matter when it is examining tradition. Historiography may present and describe patterns of action so that they can more readily be re-enacted, but tradition is not the mere creation or observance of a historical image of the past, but ‘the assimilation of beliefs and patterns of action and artefacts’ in ways that guide present actions. In the physical landscape we encounter patterns of settlement and building that arise from patterns of relational attachments, convenience, and profit. Shils explores our relationship to the built environment in terms of the veneration of old buildings, ruins, antiques, monuments, coins, artistic works, documents, and records. Such physical artefacts partake of traditions in two ways, through the tradition of their physical substrates and through the ideas, beliefs, techniques, and skills that have impressed forms upon them. Traditional crafts and empirical technologies depend upon a complex interplay of material, skill, and human response to circumstantial problems: The knowledge of patterns, the knowledge of the properties of the substances which are to be formed in accordance with, and into, patterns, the knowledge of the tools and machines, and the knowledge of the movements of the mind and the body, also move forward from generation to generation in simultaneous changedness and unchangedness. Without the tradition of knowledge and skill, the generations of worn out and ruined artefacts could not be replaced by generations of successors. Where a demand for the artefacts ceases or is greatly diminished, the flow of relevant knowledge for their production and use falls away also. (1981a: 80–1)

Shils here provides the imaginative reader a compelling lens for observing the world around us and appreciating anew how it comes to us. The construction of the room in which I write depended on the ability of a variety of tradesmen and artists to adapt building materials to a pattern that would provide an environment for my daily activities of work and life. We seldom stop to appreciate the tradesmen and the long traditions they



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re-enact, without which we could continue to be cave dwellers. Nor do we tend to pay much attention to the broader processes of creative destruction continuously at play around us. With the advent of the automobile, the demand for the skills of the farrier declined, and the trade became almost invisible except in old family photographs such as one I have of my greatgrandfather’s blacksmith shop or at demonstrations at county and state fairs. And yet even traditions that have almost passed away can be resurrected. In 1971, the American Farrier’s Association was formed by a small group of practising farriers to help promote and transmit the craft, and, undoubtedly, the association also helps the practising custodians adapt the craft to a constantly changing environment. Shils helps us see how new patterns of inventiveness have accelerated the processes of creative destruction. The embrace of rational scientific technology involved the ‘deliberate and continuous search for improvement and replacement of particular models of tools, machines, and processes through the cultivation of the relevant traditions of scientific knowledge’ (1981a: 81). These processes accelerate incremental improvements in existing technologies (such as the increasing capacity of our mobile phones to process data even as they grow smaller) as well as increase the frequency of radically disruptive changes in technology (such as the replacement of the typewriter by computer word-processing or the displacement of postal mail by email). These sorts of changes arising from a new tradition of inventiveness focus our attention on the nature of the skills and knowledges involved. This observation turns Shils’ attention from the physical to the mental environment. While tradition in the physical world arises from the necessity of use, which produces artefacts and their patterns of reproduction, tradition in the intellectual world is largely symbolic. In the acquisition and transmission of knowledge we are largely dealing with the transmission of symbolic constellations. Shils here treats us to explorations of how various forms of knowledge are transmitted, including religious knowledge and scientific knowledge. The juxtaposition of religious and scientific knowledge allows Shils to explore not only how they differ as symbolic constellations but also how they are similar. Both religion and science are carried in traditions; neither religious practice nor scientific practice begins for the typical person as a new form of action, rather the practitioner of a faith or a scientific method re-enacts a living tradition. While religious knowledge in the Jewish and Christian traditions revolves around the study of sacred texts, modern scientific knowledge first advanced through the empirical study of the book of nature. The scientific enterprise prizes originality in the sense of advancing discovery in a way that most religious traditions do not, yet both traditions in fact depend upon principles of warranting

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truth, on ‘prior consensus about the conditions under which agreement can be established’ (1981a: 114). Exploring similarities and differences between the natural sciences and humanistic studies sheds light on the need to understand disciplinary traditions. Where natural science tends to explore things apprehensible (and measurable) by the senses, the humanities have always been primarily involved with the study of symbolic constructions requiring interpretation, and thus have been the primary domain of the study of traditions themselves. Shils highlights how the modern repudiation of tradition has challenged the core role of the humanities, especially historical study, and has elevated the social science disciplines, which attend especially to contemporary conditions. The social sciences, of course, are ‘the latest major arrivals on the scene’ (Shils 1981a: 137), and the object of their concern has been not to describe and explain (erklären) the observable regularities of nature or to recover and interpret (verstehen) the creative works and artefacts of human knowledge but to commend reforms of society itself. Shils notes that the circumstances of the institutional establishments of these disciplines brought them into much greater proximity to government and political authority than the other scholarly disciplines had tended to be. At this point Shils does not explore the proximities theology had had to authorities in Western nations until the late modern age, a curious omission, since it may have helped to explain why social scientists, as he observes, ‘have generally been critical of religious faith and doctrine’ (1981a: 137).5 In shifting his attention to the endurance of past practices, Shils asks us to enter with him into ‘a harsher sphere of reality’, the world of social institutions and society. This is the world engaged by the social scientists and those they would advise and persuade, the realm of the struggle for survival and status, the pursuit of wealth and power, and ‘the exercise of coercion for all these ends’. What can tradition, those largely symbolic patterns of action and ideas, have to do with the world of interests? As Shils demonstrates, quite a lot. In the first instance, a society itself is an abstract construction that has a persistent identity through time. A society is not a concrete thing nor ‘an instantaneous synchronic phenomenon’ but a nominal identity made up of several things: the biological lineages of its inhabitants, their filiation with the name of its territory, of a sense of affinity of its members with their forebears and fellow citizens, and a re-enactment of basic patterns of human and social action that become traditional to them (1981a: 163–5). A society is also a chain of memory. In a phrase evocative of Edmund Burke, Shils states that ‘the identity of a society through time to its members and to external observers is a consensus between living generations and



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generations of the dead’ (1981a: 168). Within a society are institutions that transmit this persistent identity and help initiate new generations as active participants in the traditions of the society. Family, church, and school are the chief institutions that promote the conservation of the patterns of belief and action that give a society its identity. These institutions, which transmit cultural traditions and inculcate moral and intellectual beliefs, ‘provide the internal spine and the outer frame of the culture which maintains a society’. ‘Where they fail to do so,’ Shils asserts, ‘the society is in danger of losing its character as a society. It becomes disordered in its present organization through the loss of the constraints imposed on its present by its past’ (1981a: 185). Unfortunately omitting much attention to economic enterprises in this discussion, Shils pivots to consider political institutions. The state and the legal order provide a necessary authority that provides people ‘a place’, a ‘perception and experience of being a member of that society’ (1981a: 185). In the tradition of individualist liberalism, the state would ideally only provide for minimum conditions of law and order to secure people space in which to pursue their legitimate ends. This minarchist position implies no logically necessary tension with traditions, but in practice liberalism has often come to view itself in tension with the substantive authority of traditions arising from family, church, schools, and other forms of autochthonous voluntary associations (1981a: 185–6). In his 1958 essay ‘Tradition and Liberty’, Shils proposed that classical liberalism ‘has been all in favour of the critical emancipation of the individual from the domination of traditional institutions. The ideal society has been conceived as rationally self-determining, equally free from the pressure of irrational impulse on the one side and from dogmatic constraint on the other’ (Shils, [1958d] 1997a: 113).6 Tradition, stability, and social change While classical liberalism may have incidentally contributed to the weakening of traditions, it did not tend to do so as a purposeful end. It has been the more difficult tensions between tradition and ‘progressivistic, collectivist-liberal states’ that has done the most lasting damage to traditionality. Education in liberal democratic states has undergone significant modernization, embracing both the scientific and romantic critiques of tradition. Moreover, where representative institutions have been legitimated through popular sovereignty or the democratic will of the people, legislation had expanded ‘in quantity, in scope, and in aspiration to penetrate into the depth of society’. In modern Western societies, legislation has become the principal procedural lever for bringing about social change.

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While classical liberalism proposed ‘that law should enact only what prevails in reasoned opinion’, progressive philosophies more radically ‘undertook to change certain fundamental and long-enduring features of society’ (1981a: 188–9). The progressive tendency towards modernization has included the rational codification of law. This process of rationalization has been accompanied by an expansion of judicial action, which has annexed the Judiciary, as well as the new tribunals of the Administrative branch, as additional levers for social change (1981a: 190–1). The modernization, rationalization, and bureaucratization of Western societies have outpaced the ability of political parties to reconcile voters to the encroaching supervision by the state in all walks of life. This, Shils prophetically suggested, would lead to ongoing problems as more voters become detached from political parties, but in looking for other stable social attachments, such as families, churches, and other voluntary associations, citizens would find these institutions and their traditions also weakened. The breakdown of traditional authority dispersed through a variety of social traditions and institutions would, as Weber predicted, likely open an avenue for the rise of charismatic authority, exercised through an individual personality deemed to be ‘extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’ (Weber, [1968] 1978: 241–5). The rise of such charismatic leadership would represent a revolution in the constitution. In the middle section of Tradition (Chapters 4–7), Shils offers a deeper consideration of the problems of stability and change in society by way of examining how traditions provide both stability and avenues for change at a pace that can be accommodated to the needs of people across a society. Shils explicitly called Burke to his aid, recounting Burke’s belief that a society in which ‘long-accumulated tradition’ provided the primary source of authority was superior to one based on ‘ratiocinated principles’ (1981a: 203). Shils does not embrace the accumulated experience of tradition as the sole operative feature of tradition, however, adding that there is also a selection process at work, through which people – the necessary reenactors of tradition – ‘adopt and adapt the practices and beliefs of their predecessors’ because these patterns continue to work, more or less, to help them accomplish the tasks of their own time (1981a: 205). As Shils puts it, ‘societies retain much of what they have inherited not because they love it but because they grasp that they could not survive without it’ (1981a: 213). But change is sometimes necessary, and because it is humans who re-enact traditions, they are always going to produce subtle and not so subtle adaptations. Changes in traditions, whether to the substantive content of the tradition or to the scope and depth of adherence to the tradition or to both,



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can arise from endogenous factors or as responses to changes in exogenous circumstances. Endogenous changes can take the form of imaginative enrichments that add to the stock of patterns embodied in the tradition or to incremental improvements and refinements. No matter how stable a tradition may appear, the human mind is always ‘restlessly seeking’, and inadequacies of existing traditions inevitably appear. The accumulation and transmission of additions, corrections, rationalizations, and new responses ensure that traditions will change. Moreover, the universe’s capacity to generate new problems to which people must respond is inexhaustible. Traditions can change as they confront exogenous factors, including the encounter with other traditions, which can result in syncretism and/or amalgamation. Within a society, there can be expansions and contractions of various substantive traditions, such as has happened in Western societies where access to education has dramatically increased the diffusion of a shared intellectual culture, often at the expense of more parochial traditions. Changes in the substance of political authority, the scope of coercive power, marketplace valuations, and technological change also invite modifications of traditions (1981a: 213–61). Within a society, and between societies, encounters among adherents of different traditions can also generate conflict, with the result that some traditions may gain dominance and some may fracture and dissociate. ‘A stream of tradition’, writes Shils, ‘may break up in several directions but each of the separated streams might be as full of a general tradition as the stream from which it broke away’ (1981a: 280). The rise of sectarianisms and associated efforts to define orthodoxies and heterodoxies can test the vitality of a tradition, leading to disaggregations, divestitures, and even attenuation, whereby there is a ‘diminution of a belief, the loss of skill in the performance of activities’, and even the reduction of adherence. Shils’ descriptive account of traditions and how they operate illuminates much about the nature of social order and the ebb and flow of patterns of action and belief. Moreover, it largely dispels the developmentalist interpretation that tends to distinguish ‘primitive’ traditional societies from modern ones where substantive traditionality has yielded to rationalized authority. Nevertheless, Shils reconsiders why Weber thought that substantive traditionality would be dissolved by the inexorable processes of rationalization that have taken hold in Western societies in the quest for modernization. Weber, says Shils, did not have much confidence in the ability of traditional authority to resist the systematization, routinization, and bureaucratization that accompanied rationalization. For Weber, people’s attachments to traditions would be a poor bulwark against these processes, and resistance was likely only to be provided by the ‘reemergent charismatic individual’ (1981a: 287–2). For those who watched the

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remarkable rise of Donald Trump from real-estate magnate and reality television host to President of the United States, Weber’s interpretation seems remarkably predictive. Nevertheless, Shils invites us to reconsider the persistence of traditionality and the possibility that it offers an alternative to charismatic eruptions. The apparent conflict between tradition and reason for Shils is less a reality than a shadow cast by the development in modern Western societies of ‘ideals which are, explicitly or implicitly, directly or indirectly, injurious to substantive traditionality and which have become traditions in their turn’. The tension in social structure is not fundamentally between tradition and reason, but between two forms of tradition, a traditionality that acknowledges and receives with appreciation from the past reliable patterns of action and belief, and a newer tradition that cultivates discontent with what has been received and demands modernization. Modernization is propelled not merely by the rationalization of tradition but by the traditionalization of ‘dynamic ideals’ that compel rationality towards the substantive end of increasing and expanding material well-being for individuals. Whether in the progressivistic tradition, which has favoured government action to accomplish these ends of expanding material equality, or the classical liberal tradition, which proposed that these ends would be best realized through the limitation of political power and the energetic action of private individuals and organizations, the end has been modernization (1981a: 287–8). Shils’ interpretation helps illuminate how civil society has become a modern battleground (see Ealy, 2013, 2014). Progressivists (and increasingly cultural Marxists7) have advanced the administrative welfare state as the institutional means of modernization and have sought to co-opt the institutions and organizations of civil society – families, churches, schools, and voluntary associations – to promulgate the imperatives of rationalization and modernization in the form of social justice. The liberal vision, though holding open space for the independent action of individuals and voluntary organizations in civil society, has nevertheless expected these individuals and organizations to rationalize their own activities. Being modern, whether as a society or an individual, insists Shils, has implied ‘being “advanced” and being advanced means being rich, free of the encumbrances of familial authority, religious authority, deferentiality. It means being rational and being “rationalized”’ (1981a: 287–8). The result of the imperative to modernization, whether embodied in the progressivistic or liberal tradition, Shils believes, has been the aggravation of disorder in nearly every country around the world, including those of most ‘modern’ societies, where older substantive traditions have been attenuated but programmes of modernization have created widespread



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anomie. ‘Civil amnesia’, the disconnection from the past that accompanies the relentless drive for innovation, social change, and modernization, is dangerous to society, but its spread has been aided and abetted by the social sciences which hold a ‘large vested interest in rationalization’ (1981a: 327, 306). These charges levelled by Shils could have been written today: The undertaking of an ‘educational revolution’ to prepare the ‘high-level manpower required for development’ has produced unemployed schoolleavers, restless university students with the leisure and passion for violent and sometimes irresistible demonstrations. The increased prominence of the central government which is part of the program of modernization and an ostensible prerequisite of the rationalization aimed at has intensified demands and enlarged the range or participation in public conflicts over the distribution of benefits. (1981a: 297)

The prospects for tradition Shils thought that the processes of rationalization had been reinforced by the growing impulses of emancipationism, the belief that ‘every individual should be free to gratify his impulses, that he should attain happiness, defined by his own desires, and that he should associate only with persons who are akin to him in spirit’ (1981a: 303). When Shils wrote, the ultimate tensions between rationalization and emancipation remained largely concealed because they shared a common cause to break down substantive traditionality. Today, the tensions between rationalization and emancipation are becoming more visible, especially as the limits of identity politics are being revealed amid the breakdown of civil society, the suppression of free speech, and the return of street riots. Shils suggests that the possibility for the restoration of tradition, however, is unlikely to be found with the ‘nominally conservative political parties’, for they have often made their own accommodations to rationalizing and emancipating attitudes or have been tempted to lapse into traditionalism. A recent essay by William Lind reflects this challenge. After presenting a compelling account of the rise and influence of cultural Marxism, Lind suggests that the conservative’s proper response is to embrace ‘Retroculture’, which he defines as ‘simply living again in the old ways, the ways in which most Americans lived up through the 1950s’ (Lind, 2017: 13). Since this would require the repudiation of the digital age and the elimination of most ‘screen time’, it seems a wholly unrealistic response to the challenges we face. The prescription is inadequate to the diagnosis. Perhaps an answer is to be found in a fresh adaptation of the classical liberal tradition. In ‘Tradition and Liberty’ Shils pointed out the

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accommodations classical liberalism had made to the forces of antitradition and sought to show how liberty cannot dispense with tradition: The art and politics of liberty consists, in part, in the attenuation, retraction, and diminution of the intensity of sacred tradition to the point where liberty is at an optimum, but in which the matrix of the traditional outlook is left unimpaired. The fundamental impairment of the traditional outlook and damage to the individual’s receptiveness to tradition can only lead to an indiscipline which is momentarily mistaken for an enhancement of liberty and which in the longer run gives rise to ideological traditionalism and to enthusiasm—in neither of which is there any place for the free man. (Shils, [1958d] 1997a: 121)

The task of nurturing tradition is thus one of the permanent tasks of a community that aspires to liberty, and to face this people need rationality that is aware of its own limits, as well as the help of their ancestors. The drive to modernization; the unleashing of the impulses of emancipation; the acceleration of social change in the interest of rationalized conceptions such as social justice and equality; even the belief that individuals can attain liberty through self-regulation, are rapidly approaching their limits. The prospects that communities comprising free individuals can confront the challenges they face and co-create new opportunities for human flourishing depends a great deal on whether and how people can enact and re-enact patterns of action and belief that work. To do this they need to rediscover the intrinsic value of traditionality – without succumbing to traditionalism. This will require intentional efforts of ideological reconstruction, a reawakening of gratitude for the endowments of our cultures, and frank criticism and diminution of the modernist traditions that have sought to drive out traditionality. And it will require re-enactment; new custodians must emerge, and they must employ and balance tradition and reason as they solve the problems that confront them. There are hopeful signs that people are taking up these tasks, even as others are caught in the frenzied madness of modernism’s waning days. Micro-traditions are being recovered in the foundational tasks of survival as people are embracing organic agricultural processes to repair the quality of our food supply and honing their skills in preparing traditional cuisine in place of processed, packaged foods. Craft brewers are challenging the dominance of industrial breweries. We have seen an explosion of home schooling as people are defecting from the anti-traditional curricula and disorder of public schools. There is a resurgence of interest in classical art and architecture against modernism. These recoveries are not best described as ‘Retroculture’; they are future-oriented and reflect the



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imperative people have to make use of cultural knowledge, technical know-how, and their own reason to cultivate new patterns of human action and social co-operation that work. In The Architecture of Community, Léon Krier, a leader in the new urbanist movement that is rethinking the logic of suburban sprawl, believes that the recovery of tradition is under way, but observes that the ‘transmission of values occurs neither mechanically nor involuntarily but through determination and reason: it is a cultural choice’ (Krier, 2009: 247). The prospects of tradition are largely inseparable from the choices we make of the intellectual, social, and political authorities we will trust and to which we will submit in order to become what Vincent Ostrom has depicted as citizen-artisans. The authority of traditions, contrary to the modernist premise, may prove to be the most gentle of guides. Can we extend this recovery of traditional patterns of belief and action, and the possibilities of making better cultural choices, to the more abstract realm of our social institutions and political organization? Much will depend on how honest and discriminating we are willing to be in evaluating the traditions to which we currently adhere. How well do our current patterns of belief and action serve us? Are we open to reconsidering the substantive virtues of older traditions that might yet enrich our affiliation with our fellow citizens by reconnecting us with the accomplishments of our ancestors? How do we serve as responsible trustees of proper traditionality? Shils has issued a call to awaken to the indispensability of the past and a helpful guide for dedicating ourselves to the needed tasks ahead. Notes 1 There were important exceptions to the repudiation of tradition, such as the English controversy over the ‘ancient constitution’ in which the contestants laid claim to interpretive hegemony over the past. See Pocock, [1957] 1987; Shils, 1981a: 76–7. 2 There were other scholars attending to the disrepute of tradition in these years after the Second World War, which coincided with the rise of the modern conservative movement in the United States. Russell Kirk, also profoundly influenced by Eliot, published The Conservative Mind in 1953 to reclaim the British and American tradition of conservative thought ‘from Burke to Eliot’ and to restore the possibility that conservative order could be rebuilt out of the ruins of radicalism. In that same year the sociologist Robert Nisbet published The Quest for Community ([1953] 1990) and, later, Tradition and Revolt (1968), through which he explored the long-running ‘historical conflict between traditionalism and modernism’ (Nisbet, [1968] 1999: 3). Josef Pieper’s Tradition: Concept and Claim, published in German in 1970, also addressed the topic,

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with special attention to the interplay between sacred and secular traditions ([1970] 2010). 3 Economy and Society is a composite text incorporating material from several of Weber’s publications, but most particularly Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, published posthumously in the 1920s. Shils participated as one of the team of translators for this project. 4 Shils hazards the rule of thumb that for a pattern to be a tradition it must be transmitted at least twice over three generations. 5 Shils also briefly treats philosophy and literary works, but I omit consideration of these for the sake of space. 6 It is instructive to compare this statement of Shils with that of Hayek in The Fatal Conceit (1988). There, puzzling over the persistence of the allure of the ideology of distributive ‘social’ justice despite its tendency to undermine the impersonal rules necessary for the operation of the extended order, Hayek offered a different architecture of tradition. Hayek proposed that ‘the fatal conceit’ was the ‘idea that the ability to acquire skills stems from reason’. Instead, Hayek proposed, ‘Man became intelligent because there was tradition— that which lies between instinct and reason—for him to learn’ (emphasis in the original). Despite this attention to tradition, Hayek thought that the difficulty presented to apologists for the market order was largely due to the tension between the instinctual rules of the small band or troop (in which he includes families) and the emergent, learned rules of the extended order (the realm of market transactions based on information signals such as price and profit/loss) (see Hayek, 1988: 21–3). One might wish that Hayek and Shils had sat down to discuss whether, in fact, these distinctions could hold upon closer examination. If families can be seen to operate on learned traditions transmitted across generations, and if the ‘instinctual’ longings for equality could be seen as learned traditions reinforced by ideological programmes, Hayek’s treatment and Shils’ may have been productively refined in ways very helpful to their successors who continue to grapple with these problems. 7 Shils published Tradition before the collapse of Soviet Communism and thus does not comment on the resurgence of cultural Marxism and the renewed life of critical theory, both of which manifest the increased effort to use civil society as a lever of social change where legislative and judicial levers have been as yet inefficient.

4

Edward Shils and Michael Polanyi: the terms of engagement Phil Mullins

In his posthumous A Fragment of a Sociological Autobiography: The History of My Pursuit of a Few Ideas (hereafter Fragment), Edward Shils notes that Michael Polanyi was ‘one of three elders who have left an imprint on me’ (Shils, 2006a: 153). Shils was almost twenty years younger than Polanyi, but Polanyi was never in any institutional sense a Shils mentor. Along with Frank H. Knight and Robert E. Park, Polanyi occupies a special niche in the large circle of intellectuals Shils knew. These reflections focus on what seem to be important aspects of the thirty-year relationship between Shils and Polanyi. There is a rich correspondence as well as important scholarship that shed light on what I call the terms of engagement between Shils and Polanyi.1 Conviviality and Polanyi as the convivial other Articulate systems which foster and satisfy an intellectual passion can survive only with the support of a society which respects the values affirmed by these passions, and a society has a cultural life only to the extent to which it acknowledges and fulfils the obligation to lend its support to the cultivation of these passions … . [T]he tacit coefficients by which these articulate systems are understood and accredited, and which uphold quite generally our shaping and affirmation of factual truth, are also coefficients of a cultural life shared by a community. (Polanyi, [1958] 1964: 203)

This claim about the nature of society comes from the opening paragraph of Polanyi’s chapter titled ‘Conviviality’ in Personal Knowledge ([1958] 1964; hereafter PK). It was likely an opening commitment that Edward Shils regarded as a significant point of departure for Polanyi’s subsequent rich discussion.2 What Polanyi suggests in this opening paragraph touches upon major issues that Shils spent much of his life pursuing in terms of his interest in ‘consensus’ and ‘collective self-consciousness’ (Shils, 2006a: 114).3 Polanyi goes on in his chapter to discuss several aspects of ‘pure conviviality’ (Polanyi, [1958] 1964: 209–11), which he suggests has a

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‘primordial character’ (Polanyi, [1958] 1964: 209). One important aspect of ‘pure conviviality’ is ‘the cultivation of good fellowship’ (Polanyi, [1958] 1964: 210) enjoyed by human beings who are social and at the same time profoundly personal creatures. This cultivation has a ‘substantial character’, since it enhances ‘feelings of companionship’ (Polanyi, [1958] 1964: 211) and may, Polanyi suggests, also help nurture responsible human achievements. I highlight this discussion in PK because Polanyi’s account, in part, grew out of his contact with Edward Shils, whom he had known for about a dozen years by the time PK was published on 20 June 1958. Like Stephen Grosby, I believe that Shils helped Polanyi shape his ideas about ‘conviviality’, about its importance and its roots in ‘the tacit coefficients of articulate systems’ (Polanyi, [1958] 1964: 203). Grosby has twice suggested that ‘one can see Shils’ hand at various places’ in PK and ‘most obviously from pages 208–211’ (Grosby, 2013: 38), which includes the section on ‘pure conviviality’ (see also Grosby 2000: 13). Polanyi’s 21 January 1957 letter to Shils (ESP, MPF, B4) notes that his recent ‘journey to America has caused a considerable interruption of my work, but it gave me a lot in return – such as meeting and talking to you and – last but not least – obtaining your views about my chapter Conviviality. These were among the lasting rewards.’ I suspect that Polanyi and Shils believed their own deep intellectual and emotional connection epitomized ‘feelings of companionship’ which had grown out of the careful ‘cultivation of good fellowship’ (Polanyi, [1958] 1964: 210). Perhaps only Polanyi’s relationship with Marjorie Grene provided Polanyi with a more intimate intellectual friendship than his friendship with Shils. The dynamics of the Polanyi–Grene relationship, beginning in 1950 and running almost until Polanyi’s death, are in important ways quite different than Polanyi’s friendship with Shils. Like Shils, Grene is also heavily involved in the project of producing PK, as Polanyi acknowledges ([1958] 1964: xv); she also has a hand in many other things that Polanyi wrote after 1950, as the Polanyi–Grene letters (MPP, B16, F1–6) make clear. However, these letters also reflect that the Polanyi– Grene relationship was often a combative intellectual friendship. Shils and Polanyi do at times disagree, but the tone remains temperate and conciliatory. Shils met Michael Polanyi in autumn 1946 when he contacted Polanyi at the suggestion of Leo Szilard, a Polanyi friend and another Hungarian émigré scientist Shils knew in Chicago (Shils, 2006a: 72, 78). Shils soon also met and became quite close to Magda Polanyi, who was protective of her spouse and often suspicious of Michael’s intellectual friends, but this was not the case with Shils. Clearly, she liked Shils and trusted him as one



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in whom she could and did confide. After resigning his position at the University of Manchester in 1951, Polanyi met insurmountable difficulties in acquiring, in the McCarthy era, a visa that would allow him to move to a new position offered by the University of Chicago (see the discussion below). In this period of extraordinary stress and depression, Magda wrote to Shils (8 October 1951, ESP, MPF, B4), ‘I don’t mind telling you what he [Michael] said to me before he left for Wales: “This American business has robbed me of my home, of my job, of my professional position in England and I don’t know how I can go on living if it can’t be straightened out”’. In another letter (10 June 1952 ESP, MPF, B4), Magda Polanyi confided, ‘Michael has got a job for Marjorie [Grene] as research assistant for 1 year, beginning after Easter. I am very cross. She can fill a university and a whole town with her presence, and certainly this flat.’ In the same letter, she notes, ‘we are delighted that you will be in Manchester next year and we shall get to know your wife closer’, and she offers to secure accommodations for Shils. In his Fragment, Shils recounts his painful last visit to Polanyi after Polanyi was institutionalized near the end of his life and had lost most of his mental agility (Shils, 2006a: 80). When he confronted Michael Polanyi’s frailty, he conveyed directly to Magda Polanyi his own enormous sense of loss. What is striking about his Fragment’s later description of meeting and quickly becoming fast friends with Polanyi are two points (Shils, 2006a: 78–80). Shils notes Polanyi seemed to be ‘deaf’ (Shils, 2006a: 79) about some of Shils’ intellectual interests and intellectual contacts. I sketch below Shils’ account of this ‘deafness’, but as a prelude note how Shils portrays Polanyi as a magnetic personality, physically attractive, and extraordinarily eloquent, one who ‘was exceptionally forthcoming and friendly. He obviously took to me at once’ (Shils, 2006a: 79). Polanyi was a ‘genuinely eloquent speaker in public’ as well as a brilliant conversationalist; with his ‘slight continental accent’, he ‘spoke beautifully’, with perfect diction in a voice with a ‘resonant quality’ that was ‘like music’ – ‘one heard the echo of delicate bells in his voice’ (2006a: 79). At 5 feet 9 inches, Polanyi was ‘perfectly proportioned in body’ and had ‘a dark tincture in complexion’ (2006a: 79). His ‘beautiful eyes’ were ‘slightly sad but very active and mobile’ and, like those of many Hungarians, he had ‘a central Asian appearance’ (2006a: 79). Polanyi’s ‘upper teeth protruded very slightly’, although this was ‘not at all in any way disfiguring’ (2006a: 80). Polanyi ‘was always elegant in dress without a trace of dandyism’; he was ‘always observant of physical things in the world around him’ and was quick to respond to what interested him (2006a: 79–80). This striking – and somewhat over-the-top – portrait of Polanyi makes clear that Polanyi was a charismatic figure for Shils. Such a portrait, written fifteen years after

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Polanyi’s death, is a late grieving lament for one of his dearest companions, whom he recognized as sharing many of his intellectual interests and significantly influencing his own thought.4 Shils’ complaint about Polanyi’s ‘deafness’ is a criticism which historical records suggest is somewhat misleading. Shils reports that Polanyi was uninterested in the problems of secrecy (2006a: 78–9), and Polanyi indeed may not have been interested in secrecy in quite the same way Shils was. Shils’ 8 September 1947 letter to Polanyi (MPP, B5, F4) invited him to write an article for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on ‘security and the freedom of science’, and Polanyi apparently declined this invitation. However, Polanyi’s 1956 letter, written just after he read Shils’ The Torment of Secrecy (1956), is a letter full of praise. He portrays Shils as a fellow freedom fighter, a ‘resolute and eloquent leader who can transpose our theory of freedom into a passionate imperative’. Shils has the range of knowledge, the courage and the originality of expression which command respect … . I thank you for including me in your dedication. In a way I think it correctly expresses our partnership. You are younger and possess powers which I lack, but as fighters for freedom . . . we belong to a very small band. People are ignorant of freedom either because they take it for granted or because they have never known it. . . . You have the power to overcome this barrier. I hope we shall soon meet again for new tasks. (15 February 1956, ESP, MPF, B4)

Shils also suggests that Polanyi ‘did not want to hear anything about Mannheim or Popper’ (Shils, 2006a: 79). However, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Polanyi had a generally friendly relationship with Popper and some of the Polanyi–Shils letters suggest that Shils was aware of this friendly contact. Polanyi invited Popper to make a 1946 presentation to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society soon after Popper arrived in the UK from New Zealand and just before Polanyi met Shils. There are Polanyi–Popper letters about this presentation and other cordial letters from the late 1940s suggesting that Polanyi and Popper were interested in each other’s work and occasionally met for discussion. In one letter, Shils is mentioned as responsible for returning a paper to Polanyi on which Popper had commented (Jacobs and Mullins, 2012: 68–74). Polanyi’s 3 December 1950 letter to Shils (ESP, MPF, B4) confirms this and also invites Shils to comment on his paper. A 1949 Polanyi letter to Shils (11–16 February, ESP, B1, F1949) also notes that Polanyi planned to meet Popper in London the day before he hoped to meet Shils. In Polanyi’s 1951 collection of essays, The Logic of Liberty (1951a; hereafter LL), Polanyi indirectly criticizes Popper’s ideas about an ‘open society’, although he does not name Popper (Jacobs and Mullins, 2012: 72–4). By



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1950 Shils was likely aware of Polanyi’s criticisms of Popper’s brand of liberalism. Shils was familiar with the Polanyi material that becomes LL (Shils, 1976: 2). In 1952, Polanyi presented to the London Philosophy of Science group a paper published later in the year as ‘The Stability of Beliefs’ (Polanyi, 1952c); this was a paper Popper strenuously objected to since it implicitly rejected Popper’s falsificationism, and after the presentation the Polanyi–Popper friendship soured (Jacobs and Mullins, 2012: 74–82). It seems very likely that Shils knew about this paper and the break with Popper after 1952, and this is why he in his Fragment suggested Polanyi wanted no contact with or conversation about Popper. An early version of Polanyi’s 1952 paper was in fact Polanyi’s eighth Series I Gifford Lecture in 1951. Shils read and commented in writing on the first six of Polanyi’s Series I Gifford Lectures in a document dated September 1951 (MPP, B25, F2), and he likely read and commented on other Series I and the Series II lectures. Later in the 1950s, Shils carefully read the manuscript of PK (Polanyi, [1958] 1964: xv) which incorporated most of the 1952 paper. The context of the early Polanyi–Shils friendship By the time that Edward Shils met Michael Polanyi, Polanyi had already fled two countries and been a chemist in Manchester for thirteen years. Polanyi had done very significant research in several areas of chemistry, but by 1946 he had intellectually departed from chemistry.5 He had for more than a decade been devoting more and more of his energy to articulating a reformed liberal socioeconomic and political philosophy, and promoting a social agenda in what, loosely speaking, was an odd fusion of economics, political philosophy, philosophy of science, and cultural criticism. Even before he came to the UK in 1933, Polanyi was a student of Russian political and economic turmoil; he three times published a statistical analysis of the floundering Russian economy and also publicized Russian persecution of geneticists. In the UK, he became an articulate scientist opposing the left-inspired ‘planned science’ movement which sought to organize and direct scientific research towards social goals. Polanyi gave the Riddell Lectures in 1946 and these were published later in the same year as Science, Faith and Society (1946b, hereafter SFS), about the time he met Shils. This book was Polanyi’s most comprehensive effort to date to articulate his philosophical ideas about science, but the book is not narrowly devoted to ‘philosophy of science’ as that is sometimes construed today. SFS treats the slow growth of a naturalistic perspective in Western culture, matters concerned with authority and conscience in science, the importance of freedom, love of truth, and public discussion in the scientific community, and other related themes. The themes in SFS

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no doubt appealed to Edward Shils, a serious student of social scientific classics who had worked with Mannheim, and, during the war, had studied the loyalties of captured German soldiers. Shils also had recently begun teaching at the London School of Economics (LSE) where Polanyi was in contact with several faculty members (e.g. Hayek and Robbins). SFS is a Polanyi text that Shils, a parsimonious footnoter (Swartz, 2000: 8), later acknowledged as important for him (Shils, 2006a: 80). I suspect that Shils’ early appreciation for SFS helped establish on a solid foundation a Polanyi– Shils intellectual partnership. Soon after he met Polanyi, Shils expresses his appreciation for SFS in print, and promises a review of the book (Shils, 1947: 81n7). Shils also shows that he is thoroughly familiar with Polanyi’s work in the Society for Freedom in Science; he references several of Polanyi’s writings criticizing the planned science movement. He also approvingly uses terms and lengthy quotations from Polanyi’s 1941 review article ‘The Growth of Thought in Society’ (Polanyi, 1941), which is Polanyi’s most important early theoretical effort adapting Kohler’s ideas about ‘dynamic order’ to conceptualized society. Polanyi here sketched his model of a reformed liberal society as an evolving network of analogous, overlapping selfadjusting social orders that included science, the law, and the economy (Mullins, 2013). Shils’ short ‘A Critique of Planning—the Society for Freedom in Science’ in the March 1947 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a journal Shils frequently wrote for in this period (Shils, 2006a: 71–2), suggests Shils was at the least greatly intrigued by the wider implications of Polanyi’s framework. This article is a succinct report on the planned science movement and the criticisms of the movement mounted by the Society, but clearly Polanyi’s ideas and writing about science and society are Shils’ primary sources. His report concludes with a sentence that implies that he had grasped the broader philosophical orientation into which fit Polanyi’s social and epistemic reflections in this period: ‘What began fifteen years ago as a major attack on the freedom of science in the English-speaking world has led by counteraction to an increasingly systematic analysis of the nature and conditions of freedom’ (Shils, 1947: 82). There are several Polanyi articles in the late 1940s and early 1950s in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists when Shils worked with this journal. In the 1 December 1946 issue, Polanyi has a short article, ‘The Foundations of Freedom in Science’ (Polanyi, 1946a). Another Polanyi article opposing planned science, ‘Ought Science to be Planned? The Case for Individualism’, was published in 1949 (Polanyi, 1949c) opposite J. D. Bernal’s ‘The Case for Collective Research’ (Bernal, 1949). ‘Ought Science to be Planned? Two Opposing Views’ (i.e., the Polanyi and Bernal articles) was a recent BBC debate, recycled. Polanyi’s article eventually becomes part of LL



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(1951a). A 1949 Polanyi article was republished in 1950 as ‘Scientific Convictions and the Free Society’ (Polanyi, 1950c). This essay is a succinct statement which sets forth Polanyi’s emphasis on recovering respectability for explicit belief; it lays out his account of science as a system of beliefs and emphasizes ‘fiduciary decisions’ (1950c: 39) in science and life. The essay was also incorporated in LL and is a statement that leads rather directly into the views developed in Polanyi’s 1951 and 1952 Gifford Lectures. ‘Freedom in Science’ was published in the Bulletin in 1950 (Polanyi, 1950a) and is noted as based on a lecture Polanyi gave in April 1950 when he was Alexander White Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago (see discussion below). This short article, also much akin to material in Polanyi’s Gifford Lectures, treats the organization of science and the indeterminate nature of scientific beliefs; it has much to say about the importance of commitment and the role of tradition in science. Shils almost certainly arranged for these Polanyi publications in the Bulletin in the early years of the Polanyi–Shils friendship. He thus early understood the general contours of Polanyi’s developing ‘post-critical’ philosophical perspective, which is more systematically worked out in Polanyi’s Gifford Lectures and later in PK ([1958] 1964) (see discussion below). Polanyi’s many interests and projects outside chemistry in the 1930s and 1940s extended even beyond his involvement in the Society for Freedom in Science, his criticism of Marxism, Stalinism, and Soviet policies, and his account of science and society published in SFS. Some of these other Polanyi interests and projects also overlap with matters identified above and with interests and contacts of Edward Shils. Certainly Shils eventually knew something about these other Polanyi endeavours, and he perhaps knew something about some of them before he met Polanyi. The sketch below divides these other overlapping interests, projects, and common contacts into matters concerned with Mannheim and the Moot discussion group and matters concerned with Polanyi’s economics education film and his effort to reform liberal political philosophy. Mannheim and Oldham’s Moot In 1944, Polanyi began negotiating with Karl Mannheim, the Routledge & Kegan Paul editor of the International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction Series, to publish an essay collection.6 Shils had earlier worked closely with Mannheim, was in the UK, and was still in contact with Mannheim in this period (Moodey, 2013: 11–15). In the mid-1940s, Mannheim worked diligently to help Polanyi shape up the material for Polanyi’s book to be titled ‘The Autonomy of Science’. But Polanyi seems to have devoted most of his energy to other projects, such as Full Employment

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and Free Trade (Polanyi, 1945a, hereafter FEFT). Work on his collection for Mannheim proceeded slowly, but a contract was signed and things moved to the point of discussing final publicity materials before Mannheim died in early 1947. Although ‘The Autonomy of Science’ was never published, what was published in 1951 in the series was LL (1951a). This collection of essays includes some of the material originally slated for ‘The Autonomy of Science’ but also material that Polanyi wrote in the late 1940s and published in journals like Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Shils was familiar with much of what became LL, if not also many of the others things Polanyi wrote in this period. Polanyi also was familiar with Shils’ publications soon after they met in 1946 because Polanyi and Shils apparently quickly got into the habit of exchanging offprints. Shils’ several Polanyi references in his March 1947 Bulletin of Atomic Scientist article suggest this. So also does Polanyi’s 16 November 1948 letter to Shils (ESP, B1, F1948), which remarks that he does not know ‘exactly what the position of our correspondence is, and whether I have thanked you for your last reprints’. Polanyi’s undated (but late 1949) letter to Shils (ESP, MPF, B4) comments that he has sent off to Chicago and Routledge ‘the manuscript of my collected essays under the title “The Structure of Liberty” [an early title for LL] about a week before Christmas’. Polanyi ultimately worked out with Shils plans for his public lectures, drawn from material in LL, for the late spring of 1950 at the University of Chicago. In the three years before Mannheim’s death in early 1947, Polanyi and Mannheim met for at least a few discussions. Some of the Polanyi– Mannheim correspondence illuminates these discussions (Jacobs and Mullins, 2005: 20–7). To be sure, Polanyi and Mannheim sharply disagreed about certain ideas, and Magda Polanyi was deeply suspicious of Mannheim. How much Shils actually knew about details of Polanyi’s relationship with Mannheim from 1944 to 1947 is unclear. Shils was in contact with Mannheim in much of this period (Moodey, 2013: 12–13), but Polanyi met Shils only three or four months before Mannheim died. What is clear is that some of the things Shils said, many years after the 1940s, about Polanyi and Mannheim do not fit with the Polanyi–Mannheim correspondence and other historical records. In Shils’ late essay on Mannheim (Shils, 1995a: 234), he tells a story about learning of Mannheim’s death on 7 January 1951. In another version in his Fragment (Shils, 2006a: 36–7), he says that Mannheim died on a Sunday and he was in a taxi with Polanyi on the following Monday; when he read an obituary, he grievingly reported Mannheim’s death to Polanyi, ‘who did not say a word’ (Shils, 2006a: 37). Shils notes that Polanyi had known Mannheim in Budapest and ‘had corresponded with him in the



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1930s, but something must have happened. Polanyi often did not hear what he did not want to hear. In any case, he said not a word’ (Shils, 2006a: 37). In the version in his Mannheim essay, Shils adds, ‘Polanyi had little sympathy with Mannheim – to the point of indifference – while Mannheim was very sensitive to “Michi’s” lack of sympathy. When I said to Polanyi, that Karl Mannheim had died, Polanyi made no reply at all. He was probably thinking one of his philosophical conundrums and there was no clear category in his mind for Mannheim’ (Shils, 1995a: 234). The day Mannheim died was Thursday 9 January 1947, and there was a short obituary note in The Times (1947a: 4) on Friday 10 January, and a five-paragraph full obituary on Saturday 11 January (1947b: 4); a letter from T. S. Eliot remembering Mannheim and commenting on his remarkable influence in his short time in the UK was published in The Times on 25 January 1947 (1947c: 7). The Moot held a meeting beginning on Friday 10 January (Clements, 2010: 17), which Mannheim was scheduled to attend, and Polanyi almost certainly did attend. It seems likely that Polanyi would have learned about Mannheim’s death if not in the 10 January obituary notice, then in connection with the Moot meeting. Shils’ much later reminiscences about Polanyi seem intended to portray the character and personality of Polanyi. I do not, however, take the Mann­ heim story at face value. Shils had known Polanyi only a few months at the time Mannheim died. Shils may not have known about Polanyi’s work with Mannheim on a book and Polanyi’s discussions with Mann­ heim. Nevertheless, I suspect that Shils’ account of Polanyi’s response to Mannheim’s death reflects more about Shils’ own complex, ambiguous response to Mannheim and Mannheim’s work than Polanyi’s response to Mannheim. Polanyi was critical of many of Mannheim’s views, and some Shils criticisms (Shils, 2006a: 33–9) seem to converge with questions Polanyi raised (Jacobs and Mullins, 2005: 25–7). Shils’ views also possibly reflect that he later read such things as Polanyi’s 1951 and 1952 critical reviews in the Manchester Guardian Weekly of two of Mannheim’s posthumously published books (Polanyi, 1951b, 1952a).7 Mannheim was one of the people who recommended to J. H. Oldham that Polanyi be invited to a June 1944 meeting of Oldham’s intellectual discussion group called the ‘Moot’. 8 This launched Polanyi’s involvement in Oldham-led discussion groups which were very important to Polanyi; Shils at some point must have known about Polanyi’s involvement with these groups. Before he met Polanyi, Shils apparently knew about the Moot and its importance to Mannheim (Shils, 2006a: 39). The Moot included a number of influential literary and religious thinkers such as T. S. Eliot. Shils very likely took a serious interest in topics discussed by the Moot

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(and perhaps later Oldham-led discussion groups) and he certainly also admired and was interested in the ideas of some Moot participants such as Eliot.9 In his recently published collection of Moot materials, Keith Clements summarizes the interests and discussion of the Moot as concerned with ‘the nature of modern society, the relationship between social planning and freedom, and the role of religiously-based values in shaping society’ (Clements, 2010: 1). Polanyi attended the few Moot meetings between June 1944 and Mannheim’s death in January 1947, and, subsequently, became a regular participant in the discussion groups that Oldham put together soon after Mannheim’s death (Mullins, 1997: 180–7). Polanyi’s writing for Oldham’s discussion groups and his publications overlap, and some of this writing is especially important because it focuses on Polanyi’s developing reading of the history of modern ideas. Oldham originally asked Polanyi for permission to republish excerpts from Polanyi’s recent essay, ‘The English and the Continent’ (Polanyi, 1943), that he and other Moot members found of interest. This historically oriented essay praised the English reliance on traditional practices and gradual reform through religious ideas rather than Enlightenment philosophy, and criticized the Continent for more strictly following Enlightenment ideas leading to a more violent course of social reform. Polanyi recycled and expanded the historical argument in this 1943 essay a number of times in essays published in the middle and late 1940s. Shils very likely saw some of this more historically oriented writing, and recognized that Polanyi incorporated similar ideas in LL. ‘England and the Continent’, a 1943 essay, links his historical account with the challenges of the end of the war. ‘Science and the Modern Crisis’ (Polanyi, 1945b) originated as a 17 November 1944 Polanyi lecture presented at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society symposium titled ‘Science, the University and the Modern Crisis’. Polanyi likely sent a version of this paper to Oldham for discussion in his second Moot meeting in December 1944. A 16 November 1944 Polanyi letter to Oldham (MPP, B15, F3) suggests that he has sent Oldham ‘Scientific Materialism and the Modern Crisis’, which he advised ‘represents the kind of diagnosis which you asked me to contribute to the next meeting’. ‘Science and the Modern Crisis’ contrasts the history and the development of ideas on the Continent with what Polanyi calls the British suspension of the ‘logic of the Leviathan’ (Polanyi, 1945b: 116). British leaders did not link scientific materialism and progress: ‘religion retained a dominant position in the public life . . . and moral arguments retained their position in the guidance of public policy’ (Polanyi, 1945b: 116). At least two other essays from the late 1940s (Polanyi, 1949b, 1950b) amplify Polanyi’s historical account, showing the ways in which Enlightenment values have undermined freedom and are



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destroying liberal society. One of these essays becomes Chapter 7, ‘Perils of Inconsistency’, of LL (1951a). Polanyi’s middle and late 1940s writing reflects that he was beginning to formulate his broader narrative treating the evolving history of modern ideas, showing how late modern thought is problematic. That is, Polanyi was framing an account of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment and the ways in which Enlightenment ideas shaped modern society and culture (including science), and eventually promulgated a misrepresentation of science which becomes a source of late modern social and political problems.10 In the 1950s and 1960s, Polanyi developed further this account (i.e., his criticism of developments after the modern turn) in books and essays, but the seeds of his views go back to his writings in the 1940s, some of which Shils likely knew. Ultimately, Polanyi suggests, in his grand narrative (i.e., his broad critical and constructive philosophical vision), that the totalitarianism, nihilism, and violence of the twentieth century are the outgrowth of the way early modern ideas developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into a devastatingly materialistic, scientistic outlook that has brought cultural problems of meaning, and has also undermined the democratic political experiments to which early modern ideas gave birth. The Oldham discussion groups in which Polanyi participated are something of an incubator in which Polanyi works out some of his reading of the history of modern ideas. Edward Shils was an intellectual companion who seems to have understood this account of Western modernity that Polanyi worked on from a few years before meeting Shils until the end of his life.11 Insofar as Shils identifies Polanyi as one of only three important figures that left an imprint on him, I suspect this distinction came not only because Polanyi seemed lucidly to probe important matters (such as ‘conviviality’) about the organization of society. Polanyi also offered – woven seamlessly with his discussions of social organization – an account of the evolution of modernity and the problems of the modern mind that Shils found generally illuminating. Transforming the body politic via economics education and reformed liberalism From the mid-1930s to about the mid-1940s, Polanyi devoted significant effort to an economics education project which involved making, showing, and evaluating an innovative diagrammatic film which by the early 1940s was titled ‘Unemployment and Money: The Principles Involved’.12 Polanyi saw his film as a tool for improving economic literacy which he envisioned could transform society. If ordinary people were more economically literate – and Polanyi believed diagrammatic film was a new medium with

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great potential to educate – they would understand market cycles and the flow of money and support intelligent remedies for some contemporary economic problems; this would promote social stability and gradual change in society. Ordinary people would be less inclined naively to favour revolutionary utopian ideas that had become common currency in the West after the Russian Revolution. Polanyi’s economics education project converged with his effort to reform liberal political thought and his effort to understand the developing course of Western ideas after the scientific revolution. In the 1930s and 1940s, Polanyi effectively became a maverick, but sophisticated, Keynesian economist. Not only his work on his film, but his contacts and correspondence confirm that he was a serious student of economics literature; he worked with economists like his Manchester colleague John Jewkes, his friend Toni Stolper, and some economists at LSE, and he hoped to work with Keynes to improve and distribute his film (Polanyi to Keynes, 6 February 1940, MPP, B4, F3). The time that Polanyi put into the project of making and remaking his film, working with the Rockefeller Foundation funding agent, testing the film with audiences, consulting with different experts (e.g. film-makers and economics tutors), and exploring options for the use of this film in the UK and United States, is staggering. In the winter of 1944, Polanyi had serious throat problems that required he give up lecturing, so he spent some time in a hotel in Wales writing. He reported to Toni Stolper (9 July 1944, MPP, B4, F11) that he ‘broke off my philosophical enquiry for the time being’ and ‘started a book on Economic Policy’. He estimated that he had written about 80,000 words of this book but then realized, about six weeks before writing to Stolper, after seeking John Jewkes’s advice, that ‘the subject was too vast’. He then selected ‘about 100 pages of the material already written’ to be the basis for a book which he anticipated to be about 55,000 words when he completed the first draft. He did complete this book, which was published in 1945 as Full Employment and Free Trade (1945a). FEFT is, as Polanyi candidly announces in his Preface, ‘not concerned with elaborating the Keynesian theory further, but with its conversion into a matter of common sense’ (Polanyi, 1945a, v). This mundane objective fits with his film project’s aim of improving economic literacy. FEFT, in fact, uses some of the diagrams that were prepared for Polanyi’s film. Polanyi’s interest in improving economic literacy with what he anticipated to be the great potential of diagrammatic film, and his book focused on making Keynesian ideas a matter of common sense, suggest the practical thrust of Polanyi’s work to realize his social vision. His economics literacy project was woven with his interest in reconceiving and rejuvenating liberal political philosophy (Mullins, 2015: 36–41).



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He understood his work as carving out a middle way between what he sometimes called ‘extreme Liberalism’ (Polanyi, 1940/1975: 58) and ‘the planning of cultural and economic life’ (Polanyi, 1940/75: 59). Polanyi tried to promote discussion of political philosophy by working to establish new journals which would rethink liberal ideas. In the early 1940s, the Polanyi– Hayek letters show Polanyi was working with Hayek on the possibilities for funding a new journal of liberal thought, although this journal never materialized (Jacobs and Mullins, 2016: 112–13). When Hayek was the editor of Economica, Polanyi published ‘The Growth of Thought in Society’ (1941; discussed above as an essay Shils knows by 1947), which sketches his model of a liberal society. Polanyi was invited by Hayek (whom Shils apparently knew before he met Polanyi) to be a charter member of the Mont Pelerin Society, which had as its objective rethinking liberalism and held its first meeting in April 1947. Polanyi apparently played an important role in the first meeting and participated in the Society for several years, although he eventually advised Hayek he disagreed with dominant ideas in the Society about liberty (Jacobs and Mullins, 2016: 126–7). Shils at least eventually knew about the Society and Polanyi’s involvement in it. In March 1945, Polanyi drafted a proposal for Civitas, a journal of liberal thought focusing on politics, economics, and philosophy (online in Gelwick, 1963; also available in MPP, B50, F5 and MPP, B4, F12). Polanyi correspondence suggests the proposal went to Polanyi’s economist friends, Toni and Gustave Stolper (Polanyi to the Stolpers, 29 March 1945, MPP, B4, F12; Toni Stolper to Polanyi, 18 May 1945, MPP, B4, F12), to Mann­ heim and probably to some of Polanyi’s Manchester colleagues (Gábor, 2003, letters nos 260, 261), although this journal also never was actually produced. The proposal articulates several of Polanyi’s notions about the needed reforms of older liberal political philosophy and treats the intertwined nature of economic and political matters (Mullins, 2015: 36–41).13 Polanyi held that liberalism can no longer rely on notions taken to be selfevident but must affirm explicit beliefs. These ideas should be linked not only to Polanyi’s emerging post-critical philosophical perspective, but also to his criticisms of Popper’s ‘open society’ liberalism that are hinted at in the Preface to LL (Polanyi, 1951a: vi–vii; Mullins, 2015: 39). In the summer of 1946, just before Polanyi met Shils, Polanyi and several Manchester colleagues published the first of eight issues (from 1946–48) of Humanitas, which was a journal of liberal thought with a reasonably broad cultural orientation. The (unsigned) statement of purpose in the journal (Humanitas, 1946: 2) laments that political discussion has devolved into a game of placing blame on one group or another; what is needed is a ‘sense of political responsibility informed by awareness of a humane scale of values’. Humanitas was to be a journal addressing the ‘supreme need . . . for men

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to achieve some agreement concerning the ends they seek’. Polanyi was, by the middle of 1947, the chair of the editorial board, and he published two articles in the journal. ‘Why Profits?’ appeared in the Autumn 1946 issue in a symposium on the profit motive in trade and industry (Polanyi, 1946c). This essay is later recycled as the ninth chapter of LL. Polanyi also published in the February 1947 issue his essay ‘Science: Observation and Belief’ (Polanyi, 1947), which challenges mainstream philosophical ideas about scientific knowledge and emphasizes the importance of explicit belief; these themes Polanyi develops in other essays in this period (e.g. ‘Scientific Convictions and the Free Society’ in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists [Polanyi, 1950c]), in LL, and in his 1951 and 1952 Gifford Lectures. Edward Shils very likely was familiar with Polanyi’s writing in Humanitas. A 23 December 1947 letter to Shils (ESP, B1, F1947) mentions Humanitas and suggests that Shils was writing an article on liberalism for the journal, although no article was ever published before Humanitas folded the next year. To summarize, it is unclear how much Shils knew concretely about Polanyi’s decade of work before he met Shils on his economics education project focusing on his experiments with a diagrammatic film. It seems unlikely that Shils was wholly ignorant of Polanyi’s film project, although Polanyi’s work on the project seems to have been winding down in the late 1940s. Polanyi did continue in this period to publish articles that treated topics in economics, liberal political philosophy, and philosophy of science. Shils was aware of many of these publications, and Polanyi’s interest in economics literacy converges with these Polanyi interests. Shils, by 1947, knew about Polanyi’s work on Humanitas, which aimed at promoting liberal thought. Shils perhaps also eventually knew some things about Polanyi’s more specific interest in Keynes’s ideas and Polanyi’s 1945 book FEFT and his involvement in the Mont Pelerin Society. Shils, the Gifford Lectures, and Personal Knowledge In May 1947, Polanyi received an invitation to give the Gifford Lectures originally scheduled for delivery in 1949 and 1950.14 Accepting this invitation initiated a new, large project, and this looming responsibility may be one reason some of Polanyi’s work on his film and in economics seems to decline after the mid-1940s. However, his turn from his earlier focus upon improving economics literacy and recasting liberal political philosophy also reflects that Polanyi’s reading of the scope and depth of the problems in Western culture required a broader cultural criticism, and called for the articulation of a new philosophical foundation. Polanyi aimed to



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provide this in his Gifford Lectures, but he had trouble getting them together. He postponed them several times and even tried to resign from his agreement to give the lectures; but he eventually delivered two sets of ten lectures in 1951 and 1952, and these were revised and published six years later as PK ([1958] 1964). As suggested above, Polanyi’s essays and material in LL from the late 1940s – material to which Shils was attuned – suggest Polanyi already was moving toward his effort to articulate the ‘post-critical’ philosophical perspective alluded to in the title of Polanyi’s Gifford Lectures, ‘Commitment, In Quest of a Post-Critical Philosophy’ and the subtitle of PK, ‘Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy’.15 In his Gifford Lectures and PK, Polanyi contended the ‘critical movement’ of the previous several centuries was coming to an end, and the new era of thought would be one in which human beings recognized that ‘no intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside . . . a fiduciary framework’ (Polanyi, [1958] 1964: 266). The term ‘fiduciary’ is frequently used in his Gifford Lectures and PK, and the 1964 Preface (Polanyi, [1958] 1964: ix–x) draws attention to it as the key term marking the book’s philosophical ‘task of justifying the holding of unproven traditional beliefs’ (Polanyi, [1958] 1964: ix). In sum, by the late 1940s, Polanyi was pulling together his own broader account of the array of cultural problems initiated by the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment; his Gifford Lectures and PK, published six years later, coherently assemble a sharp criticism of critical philosophy and its view of science, but they also offer Polanyi’s constructive philosophical alternative. Edward Shils and Marjorie Grene are Polanyi’s conversation partners who seem first and most clearly to grasp the broad range of the philosophical and cultural narrative Polanyi is attempting to work out. In the decade Polanyi was working on his Gifford Lectures, and then on his magnum opus PK, Edward Shils was a stabilizing and influential intellectual companion whose judgement Polanyi sought and trusted. In the early stages of Polanyi’s effort to pull together his Gifford Lectures, he turned to Shils for advice and support. Shils arranged for Polanyi to be a visiting professor at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1950, and Polanyi essentially negotiated with Shils about the topic and advertising for his Chicago lectures. Although he thought it safest for his lectures to draw from his recently completed LL, Polanyi confessed to Shils in an undated but late 1949 letter (ESP, MPF, B4), ‘my true interest lies in getting my basic position clear which would be hinted at in a title like “Towards a post-critical age”’, but he admitted that he did not have his material for this title fully prepared. Nevertheless, Polanyi says, ‘I should concentrate on it, since it is what I need for my Gifford Lectures. If you can react to

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this at all, I should be most grateful.’ Polanyi saw Shils as one whose judgement he could rely on as he began his work on his most far-reaching philosophical project. As the earlier discussion has briefly noted, Polanyi also looked to Shils for feedback about his Gifford Lectures soon after they were delivered and later as he put together chapters of PK, such as ‘Conviviality’. Polanyi’s 23 July 1951 letter to Shils (ESP, MPF, B4) asks him to return the copy of his Series I lectures since Polanyi needed to work on the forthcoming Series II lectures. His 25 July 1951 letter to Shils (ESP, MPF, B4) indicates he anticipates ‘receiving your detailed comments on my manuscript. Your criticism of the structure and formulation of my text will be as valuable as any material points you might make.’ Polanyi notes that he is considering publishing Series I lectures independently, since this ‘would somewhat facilitate the writing of the second part’, and he asks Shils’ reaction to this option. When Shils finished reading Polanyi’s final draft of PK, he wrote to Polanyi (4 June 1957, MPP, B5, F10) to affirm how strikingly insightful and important for his own thinking he found the book: ‘Personal Knowledge has become a part of my mental furniture and it radiates and elaborates itself into every sphere of intellectual activity into which I enter.’ Later, in an autumn letter (23 October 1957, MPP, B5, F10), Shils reiterated his evaluation of the importance of the book: ‘It is a grandiose achievement, breath taking—literally so—in its profundity and daring, and one of the most enriching books I have ever read . . . It is a magnificent work, my dear Michael and I cannot sufficiently praise it or you for having done it.’ Polanyi’s confidence in Shils clearly shows in the fact that he requested that Shils write – and Shils did so – the short note on the PK dust-jacket which Polanyi did not think he could do: I have just been asked by the publisher to give him 200 words for the dustjacket. Usually he does that himself, but he finds it too difficult in this case. Unfortunately, I find it very difficult myself, too, for I do not know how to approach the public best in such brief terms on such a large matter. On the other hand, I am sure you could write down the most suitable 200 words in little over 200 seconds. Might I ask you to do this? (28 August 1957, ESP, MPF)

Polanyi’s interests and projects were a good fit for Edward Shils in 1946, and in the years thereafter real intellectual solidarity blossomed. Shils seems generally to have found Polanyi’s developing insights about science and society, and his emerging account of the development of modern ideas shaping modern history and the modern mind, illuminating. A 1960 letter, written soon after Shils had read a recently received Polanyi article (likely



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Polanyi, 1961, which sketches a broad account of the development of ideas leading to the present) amply demonstrates this. Shils describes studying Polanyi’s article as a ‘breath-taking and exhilarating experience’ which made him mindful of ‘the strong kinship which binds us, not only personally, but intellectually’: You have been ‘theologizing’ science. I have been trying to ‘theologize’ society. There are not just parallels between us, but bridges also across the parallel lines. The effort to grasp the creative powers of man’s mind in us reach toward something ineffable, inarticulable, luminous. In a critical and disciplined way, that is what man tries to reach through scientific discovery. In a less critical and less disciplined way, it is what, I think, he responds to in authority and so much else in which authority permeates or dribbles. (3 November 1960, ESP, MPF, B4)

Shils as muse, mentor, and advocate The Polanyi–Shils correspondence highlights the uncanny rapport which Shils reports that Polanyi showed for him from early in the friendship; soon enough, this rapport was underlain by the recognition of common interests and outlook. This does not, of course, mean Shils and Polanyi agreed about everything. They did not, although they walked more or less along a common path and recognized it. Both men went out of their way, over the course of thirty years, to spend time together in the United States, the UK, and elsewhere. Polanyi’s remark in a 26 October 1959 letter (ESP, MPF, B4) summarizes what seems to have been the sense of things of both men: ‘I wish you were here to talk about all kinds of things. I still find the world very interesting, particularly in your company.’ Were there other factors bearing on this uncanny rapport between Shils and Polanyi? Below I briefly describe three important contributions Shils made to the Polanyi– Shils relationship in terms of overlapping roles Shils took on as Polanyi’s muse, his mentor in social science, and his advocate in certain practical affairs. After meeting each other, Polanyi and Shils each worked to include the other in various projects that engaged them. Shils saw that several Polanyi essays appeared in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Polanyi invited Shils to write for the short-lived journal Humanitas, and he also tried to get Shils involved in his work at the University of Manchester. After Polanyi officially left his Chemistry position for a chair in Social Studies in 1948, he worked on building the Manchester social science programme. On 16 November 1948 (ESP, B1, F1948), he wrote to Shils asking for recommendations to fill Simon Visiting Professorships with ‘eminent men in the field of Social Science’ and indicated he

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was particularly interested in social anthropologists. Shils responded (24 November 1948, ESP, B1, F1948) with a list of four possible American anthropologists who he considered outstanding. But Polanyi seems also to have hoped that he could arrange for Shils himself to be close at hand in Manchester. A Polanyi letter in early 1949 (11–16 February 1949, ESP, B1, F1949) begins by noting, ‘I have a growing feeling that we ought to collaborate more closely. You seem to appreciate my efforts and I profit enormously from your much wider knowledge and greater vitality.’ In another letter a few days later (18 February 1949, ESP, MPF, B4), just before he hoped to see Shils in London, Polanyi says, ‘the more often I meet you, the more I feel that we could probably do good work together, and at any rate I feel much tempted to induce you in this direction’. Polanyi asked Shils to consider moving to a reader position in Social Anthropology at Manchester (as a stepping stone to a future chair in Sociology that Polanyi hoped would be established) and advised Shils in a 23 February 1949 letter (B4, MPF, ESP) that he could interpret ‘the subject so as to fit your interests’. Shils reports a visit to Manchester in late 1946 or early 1947 (Shils, 2006a: 109; [1958a] 1972a: 21), and Polanyi also invited Shils to Manchester for presentations in February 1949, although this visit apparently was deferred until later (9 December 1948, ESP, B1, F1948; 14 March 1949, ESP, B1, F1949). In his 18 February 1949 letter, Polanyi notes that he had arranged for Shils to be in Manchester in the summer of 1950. In late March 1950, Polanyi made his first visit (arranged by Shils – see the discussion below) to lecture at the University of Chicago. In an undated but late 1949 letter (ESP, MPF, B4), Polanyi indicates about his forthcoming Chicago residency that the ‘only thing that worries me is whether you will be there too. I very much counted on spending much time with you.’ Polanyi arranged for Shils to come to Manchester for an extended stay in 1953; he apparently sent Shils a manuscript for review in anticipation of undertaking a ‘joint exploration’ during Shils’ time in Manchester (27 May 1952, ESP, MPF, B4). From the earliest years of their friendship, Polanyi made serious efforts to be near Shils and clearly wished to coordinate some of their scholarly writing. In some ways, Shils seems to have been something like a muse for Polanyi. Shils’ writings and perhaps conversations with Shils apparently were a catalyst stimulating Polanyi’s own writing projects. Shils’ muse role is clearest in Polanyi’s 15 July 1957 letter; he reports to Shils that he has almost finished his revisions of PK and that he plans soon to put a revised copy in Shils’ hands, but he also notes his next pressing scholarly project: I have now to turn my mind to the preparation of my Lindsay Lectures for next February. Unfortunately I have given them the absurd title The Study



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of Man which includes everything I know nothing about. It would help me to focus on some problems if you would let me have a sample of your recent writings. Our thoughts have a way of supplementing each other which could be made more effective by closer cooperation. (15 July 1957, ESP, MPF, B4)

In a follow-up letter of 28 August 1957 (ESP, MPF, B4), Polanyi repeats his request that Shils send him recent writing. Shils’ 23 October 1957 letter (MPP, B5, F10) belatedly offers an alternative plan to Polanyi: ‘Re Mss on Study of Man, may I suggest that we devote a few hours to this in Paris and that before that, you send me a few of the headings under which you will treat the subject. That will enable me to give you some assistance— though I expect I will learn more than teach.’ Shils’ role as something of a Polanyi muse should be linked with his role as a mentor for Polanyi in the literature of the social sciences. If Polanyi, like Shils, had written a late intellectual autobiography, he might have acknowledged Shils’ imprint upon his thinking in this area. Moodey has shown how Shils coached Polanyi to take an interest in Shils’ work with Parsons around 1950, although Shils and Polanyi seem rather quickly to have abandoned a Parsons-like theoretical framework (Moodey, 2013). Polanyi was a figure with a polymathic disposition and he seems very soon after meeting Shils to have discerned that Shils could introduce him to classical sociology and other social science literature, which Polanyi apparently had not earlier seriously studied, and about which he harboured many prejudices. Polanyi’s creative chemistry research in several different areas in part reflected Polanyi’s willingness to enter new areas with the fresh eyes of an outsider, as one who lacked the background to know more established ways of thinking, but this also sometimes limited Polanyi’s insight (Scott and Moleski, 2005: 68). Also Polanyi believed – and he was educated at a time many natural scientists shared this view – that natural scientists could intelligently address issues treated in areas of inquiry like economics (Scott and Moleski, 2005: 102, 121). As I have noted, Polanyi became a maverick but sophisticated economist. His Berlin economics discussion group, his Manchester colleague John Jewkes, his friend Toni Stolper, and perhaps others like Hayek helped Polanyi find his way into the literature of economics. After he met Marjorie Grene in his spring 1950 visit to the University of Chicago, Grene became an intimate intellectual companion and collaborator whom Polanyi, for the next twenty-five years, relied on to help sort out many issues treated in the history of Western philosophy and contemporary philosophy of science (Mullins, 2002: 34–40). Polanyi’s interest in and willingness to explore some of the literature of the social sciences under Shils’ tutelage thus has some parallels.

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Early in the Polanyi–Shils friendship, Polanyi apparently turned to Shils for some basic instruction in the literature of the social sciences. A 4 August 1949 letter to Shils (ESP, B1, F47–9) says, ‘I was happy to hear from you and very grateful for the copy of Weber’s book which you sent me. I got immersed in it straight away and derived some of the instruction which I am sure you thought I was in need of when I ventured into this field without properly exploring its background.’ The general pattern of Polanyi’s reading is, of course, never clear, since he received reading suggestions from many sources, but perhaps especially those from Shils, Grene, and Oldham were important. Polanyi apparently believed that he needed to know more about the literature of social sciences as he prepared for his Gifford Lectures. Shils at times sharply chided Polanyi about his readiness to rush to conclusions about the perversity of the social sciences. In a 5 April 1951 letter (ESP, MPF, B4), Shils criticizes Polanyi’s ideas found at the end of a transcript of a BBC broadcast ‘Salvation by Science’. He contends that Polanyi’s conclusion that ‘“the materialistic conception of politics”’ and the revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ‘can hardly be attributed to social science’. Much of Polanyi’s argument suggesting social science led to ‘the deterioration of public morals’, Shils bluntly points out, is fundamentally confused. Polanyi jumps to conclusions far too quickly: Neither the Soviet nor the Nazi concentration camps any more than the comparatively humane Czarist exile system can be laid at the door of modern psychology or that dubious subject called social psychology. Wicked men and the pressure of the social machine on weak men can contrive far more ruinous devices for injuring the human race than the poor social scientist could conceive.

Shils advises that he thinks Polanyi’s argument would work better in reverse: The same intellectual atmosphere which has produced the immoral attitude toward human beings which is manifested in so much of twentieth century politics and which has long been manifested at various times and with varying intensity in public life, has also allowed the development of the impersonal and detached attitude toward human beings which is one of the ingredients of modern social science.

Polanyi was often sharply critical of the scientistic orientation of much literature in the social sciences, and he seems to have regarded this orientation as much more dangerous than when natural scientists or philosophers of science espoused similar views. Polanyi asked probing questions about the so-called objectivity and ‘value-free’ nature of social scientific analysis



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(Polanyi, 1966; Fennell, 2010). Shils seems generally to have approved of Polanyi’s criticisms of many common views of social scientists, but he did make an effort to slow Polanyi’s rush to sweeping judgements: I hate to appear to be such a persistent proponent of this poor, weak creature called social science, but just as its more intellectual pretences cannot stand careful scrutiny, so I also think that excessive charges against its pernicious consequences, at least on the basis of its record thus far, must also be moderated. (5 April 1951, ESP, MPF, B4)

Early in the Polanyi–Shils friendship, Shils took on the role of a Polanyi advocate who organized opportunities for Polanyi and tried to unscramble Polanyi’s various problems. Polanyi was himself a capable organizer who had directed a research laboratory and initiated and arranged many interesting projects. But as he aged, Polanyi often preferred to allow trusted intellectual companions to put together projects in which he was deeply invested. Marjorie Grene had a role in the preparation of Polanyi’s Series II Gifford Lectures and she worked with Polanyi for six years on PK (Mullins, 2002: 31–40; Polanyi, [1958] 1964: xv). In the mid-1960s, it was Grene’s energy and savvy, working with Polanyi and others, possibly including Shils, which led to multi-year programmes, funded by the Ford Foundation, sponsoring interdisciplinary conferences. Polanyi’s cultural criticism and his call for a post-critical philosophy grounded these Ford projects, and Polanyi chaired the committee requesting funding, but Grene organized things on the ground (Breytspraak and Mullins, forthcoming). Edward Shils, like Grene, was a gifted organizer with energy and the ability to attend to detail. He put together things which promoted Polanyi and the ideas for which Polanyi stood and was, from time to time, called upon to help Polanyi extricate himself from difficulties. The most obvious case of Shils’ role as a Polanyi advocate is concerned with Polanyi’s effort to move to a permanent position at the University of Chicago. Shils set up Polanyi’s first term as a visiting professor in the spring of 1950. His 7 September 1949 letter to Polanyi (ESP, MPF, B4) states, ‘I have been authorized by Chancellor Hutchins of the University to invite you to accept the White professorship at this University for the winter or spring of 1950, if that is possible for you.’ In Polanyi’s many temporary appointments after 1950 in the Committee on Social Thought programme, Shils seems frequently to have been behind the scenes arranging things. Polanyi’s 16 November 1953 letter (ESP, MPF, B4) thanks Shils for coming up with a fitting title for his lectures in his 1954 Chicago visit. Shils’ 20 May 1964 letter (ESP, MPF, B4) to Polanyi proposes a ‘recurrent presence in Chicago’. Shils often, in collaboration with Polanyi but sometimes independently of Polanyi, seems to have taken on the role of finding

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foundation money to cover Polanyi’s expenses or those of assisting figures like Marjorie Grene. Shils was deeply entangled in the complex set of events concerned with offering Polanyi a permanent University of Chicago appointment which originally was slated to commence in autumn 1951.16 Negotiations apparently began in Polanyi’s 1950 visit to Chicago, and subsequent events unfolded over the course of the next few years. Polanyi agreed to take the position and resigned his Manchester position, but could not secure a visa allowing him to enter the United States in the fall of 1951. Polanyi worked diligently to discover why he was excluded and to unscramble a series of bureaucratic errors. This was an extenuated nightmare, and Shils seems to have been in the middle of it, apparently negotiating for Polanyi with the University of Chicago (who Polanyi later regarded as changing the employment terms when a new chancellor was appointed) and with US authorities who issue visas. Ultimately, Polanyi resigned his Chicago appointment in November 1951 and reclaimed his position in Manchester; he did not receive a visa allowing him to travel to the United States until 1953.17 Shils was the special editor of the October 1952 issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, focusing on the problems created for scientists by US policy in the McCarthy era. The issue opened with his pointed editorial, ‘America’s Paper Curtain’ (Shils, 1952), and included many short articles documenting the experience of scientists of many nationalities. Polanyi set forth in detail his case as the first of seven British cases (Polanyi, 1952b). It is possible that, in fact, Shils wrote the account of Polanyi’s visa problems, although it is a first-person account. Polanyi’s 27 May 1952 letter to Shils (ESP, MPF, B4) promises to send to Shils all the material from ‘my prolonged attempt to secure a visa. I think it would be better if you wrote it up, since you could introduce such items as you know of from your end. Of these proceedings I am not fully informed and do not know what I may quote of such information as I possess.’ Polanyi’s 20 October 1952 letter to Shils (ESP, MPF, B4) after the Bulletin came out compliments Shils on taking action which ‘achieved immediate success of a considerable degree where no one else saw even a chance for it’: It seemed to me that you have in the past been often depressed by American public life and that you may henceforth rightly feel that you can do something to amend its shortcomings. For one so passionately devoted as you are to the common good it may make a great difference to know that you have some power to do good. It pleases me also to find myself fighting in your company—as much as it will please me to benefit from your part in it when I shall eventually get a visa.



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Notes 1 I and several other scholars have elsewhere commented on the links between Shils and Polanyi. This chapter draws on this literature, but also includes material that has more recently come to my attention. The extensive correspondence in the Edward Shils Papers (hereafter ESP) and the Michael Polanyi Papers (hereafter MPP) – both in the Department of Special Collections of the University of Chicago Library (and cited with permission) – reveals the rich contours of the Shils–Polanyi relationship. The ESP are not yet open to the public, and I thank literary executor Stephen Grosby for allowing me to review this material. All references to ESP are to boxes in Series III. Citations hereafter in parentheses include the collection (ESP or MPP), box (B), folder number (F) or folder name (MPF is the ‘Michael Polanyi’ folder in ESP), and the date of correspondence and the writer (if this is not provided in the discussion). Since the Department of Special Collections project of organizing the enormous collection of Shils materials is ongoing, it is possible that the currently used filing system may change. 2 Shils was one of five readers of the draft of PK (Polanyi, [1958] 1964: xv) and, as I note below, liked the ideas Polanyi developed under the rubric ‘conviviality’. Another reader who provided an important set of criticisms was J. H. Oldham, who objected to Polanyi’s term ‘conviviality’ because he feared it would be understood merely as ‘banqueting’ (Oldham to Polanyi, 11 May 1957, MPP, B15, F5). See Mullins, 1997 for a discussion of Polanyi’s long-term friendship with Oldham and his influence on Polanyi. 3 See also Shils 2006a: 146–7, 158–9 where he identifies the ‘same rock’ (158) he has spent his life chipping away at as ‘the nature and conditions of consensus or of social solidarity, or loyalty’, which he contends is ‘the problem of all classical sociological and political theory’ (159). Steven Grosby paraphrases Shils’ lifelong intellectual passion as concerned with ‘the fact of the existence of “we”, whether as a friendship, as a result of love, as a religious organization, or as a national society’ (Grosby, 2006: 4). While Polanyi does not straightforwardly place his domain of inquiry in the context of social scientific thought, the kinship of his interests and commitments and those of Shils is clear, as I hope to show. To hazard a one-sentence summary of the rock Polanyi seems to have spent his life chipping away at, I suggest that Polanyi sought to understand the epistemic constraints and possibilities of human beings as members of the good society. 4 If he had lived longer, Shils might have further redacted this section of his posthumously published Fragment (Shils, 2006a, 78–80). His more circumspect Minerva obituary says about Polanyi: ‘the noble elevation of his bearing, his eloquence of speech, his compassion and his clarity of conviction were of a piece with his devotion to the discovery and possession of truth and his conception of it as one of the first obligations of a good society. They made a profound impression in me’ (Shils, 1976: 3). Interestingly, he also adds that it was the influence of Polanyi and Max Weber that led to the founding of

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Minerva: ‘the confluence of these two remarkable minds . . . formed in my own mind the decision to found Minerva’ (Shils, 1976: 3). Minerva was a journal subsidized by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (hereafter CCF). In July 1954, Polanyi became the chair of a permanent Committee for Science and Freedom of the CCF. In a 16 November 1953 letter (ESP, MPF, B4), when he apparently was temporary chair, Polanyi thanks Shils for agreeing to become a committee member; in 1959, when Polanyi wished to step down as chair, he apparently pressed Shils to succeed him (2 March 1959, ESP, MPF, B4). Soon after Polanyi became chair, The Bulletin of the Committee on Science and Freedom and Special Supplements began to be published in Manchester (under Polanyi’s editorship or supervision), and this journal survived as a CCF publication until it was replaced in 1961 by Minerva (Coleman, 1989: 98; Scott and Moleski, 2005: 225). First Shils, but soon thereafter Polanyi, became extensively involved in the CCF in the early 1950s (Breytspraak and Mullins, 2017); their ongoing collaboration helped shape CCF programmes for most of the life of the CCF. Shils, Polanyi, and the CCF is a rich topic that I omit in this chapter. 5 With the help of his economist colleague and friend John Jewkes and the administration, Polanyi officially exchanged his chair for an appointment in Social Studies in 1948 after he received an invitation to give the Gifford Lectures in 1947 (Scott and Moleski, 2005: 203–4). Shils probably knew some of the details of this transition, which seems to have included a certain amount of difficulty for Polanyi. Polanyi continued to publish some chemistry research until about 1950. See the interesting compliments and complaints of Melvin Calvin (a 1961 Nobel Laureate) about working with Polanyi, the chemist with many interests, on a postdoctoral fellowship from 1935 to 1937 (Calvin, 1992). 6 Jacobs and Mullins (2005, 2006) discuss this unpublished book, Polanyi’s relation with Mannheim, and their interaction in Oldham’s discussion group called the ‘Moot’. I draw on these essays which cite the Polanyi–Mannheim correspondence and Moot records in MPP. 7 This Shils story about Mannheim’s death has, unfortunately, been picked up by other scholars. Stephen Turner concludes that the Shils story shows that Polanyi, like the unsentimental Shils, had the ability to make hard intellectual judgements and stick with them (S. Turner, 1996: 8). Like me, Richard Moodey finds dubious much about Shils’ story (Moodey, 2013: 14). He regards Shils’ conjecture about Polanyi’s thinking, when told of Mannheim’s death, as likely mistaken because Polanyi seems to have been a person of high moral character. He does not think Polanyi was indifferent to Mannheim, although he notes Polanyi was critical of him. Moodey, like me, believes that Shils had a complicated and changing attitude towards Mannheim that is reflected in much that Shils says. He emphasizes that Mannheim, even after his death, remained important to both Polanyi and Shils; commentators like Nye (2010: 280) and Pooley (2007: 372) have made this clear. 8 Mannheim and Polanyi discussed the Moot, including Mannheim’s role in encouraging Polanyi to be invited to the group (Jacobs and Mullins, 2005:



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28–31). The Moot began meeting in 1938 and was interested in shaping postwar society in terms of Christian values. Clements provides brief biographies of Moot members and meeting guests (Clements, 2010: 18–34). He suggests that Mannheim was the central figure around which much discussion revolved in the Moot (Clements, 2010: 12); but, after Mannheim’s death, Polanyi became the central figure in Oldham’s groups (Clements, 2010: 17). See also Mullins 1997: 180–5 for a detailed discussion of Polanyi’s involvement from 1944 to 1947 in the Moot (which was officially disbanded after Mannheim’s death) and later Moot-like Oldham discussion groups. 9 Soon after Polanyi began negotiating with Mannheim for a book contact and just before attending his first Moot meeting, Polanyi initiated contact with Eliot, an editor at Faber & Faber, to inquire about Eliot’s interest in a book Polanyi called ‘Science and Human Ideas’, which may be the same book for which he eventually worked out a contract with Mannheim (Polanyi to Eliot, 3 June 1944, MPP, B4, F11). Eliot wrote a short paper, ‘On the Place and Function of the Clerisy’, for the December 1944 Moot meeting, and Polanyi and Mannheim were invited to respond (see Jacobs and Mullins, 2006 for detailed discussion and edited copies of papers). Polanyi’s three-page response makes clear Polanyi’s interest in tradition and specialist clerisies such as the specialized intellectuals of the scientific community (Jacobs and Mullins, 2006: 172–6). Polanyi emphasizes the role of specialist clerisies in embodying tradition and promoting new thought that transforms traditions. Polanyi’s interest in Eliot’s ideas and especially in tradition and the role of intellectuals pre-dates his meeting Edward Shils in 1946, but the sharing of these interests later makes for a fast friendship. Shils credits Polanyi as a figure who first took an interest in tradition in science, although Shils claims that he was unable to engage Polanyi in a broader conversation about tradition (Shils, 2006a: 99; see also Shils, 1995/96: 23). While Polanyi did take a special interest in tradition in science, his interest was never limited to science. Discussion below makes clear that by the mid-1940s Polanyi’s writing emphasized the broader historical and cultural contours of his interest in tradition in British (and North American) society. It is puzzling that Shils does not sometimes seem to have recognized this thread in Polanyi’s account emerging in the late 1940s. See also Moodey 2013. 10 Polanyi’s 9 July 1944 letter to Toni Stolper (MPP, B4, F11) sketches what he envisioned as the introductory essay for ‘The Autonomy of Science’, and this sketch succinctly articulated Polanyi’s account of modernity’s slide into a scientistic view as well as his remedy. That is, Polanyi offers both his criticisms of the developing course of modern ideas and his constructive philosophical alternative and, in his 1951–52 Gifford Lectures and later in PK, Polanyi works out in some detail both his critical and his constructive account: ‘The essay will deal with the history of the movement which Hayek has called “scientism”, or rather with the history of science from the rise of modern science to the first expression of the claim, by Saint-Simon and Comte, that science should rule society. I shall then show how the “scientific” or materialist view of society

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and the disintegration of the cognitive basis of science by a continued application of the critical method which originally started modern science, jointly led to the subjection of science to behaviourist and utilitarian exigencies. Science having thus by its own hubris destroyed its own basis, once more regaining its standing by accepting the fact that it is ultimately based on faith and on traditional devotion to certain ideals. From this there re-starts the renaissance of ideals including those which (as a sideline of the argument will demonstrate) science has destroyed (or helped to destroy) even before it destroyed its own basis. By the same token which allows science to regain faith in itself, faith as a principle is restored in general.’ 11 In both his Fragment (Shils, 2006a: 109–10) ) and his posthumously published essay on the tradition of intellectuals (Shils, 1995/96: 21–3), Shils reports on a January 1947 address in Manchester in which he disputed with his host Polanyi. Shils contends that Polanyi did not, in 1947, recognize that natural scientists were a particular species of highly specialized intellectuals who, on the whole, were not sharply alienated from their societies, as are most modern intellectuals. Shils suggests that Polanyi later came around to the views which Shils held about alienated intellectuals and he points as evidence to Polanyi’s later essay, ‘Beyond Nihilism’ (Polanyi, 1960). This is an interesting claim that perhaps implies Shils was an important source for Polanyi’s mid-century account of the problems of the critical tradition and the ways it has perversely shaped the modern mind. But, like some other Shils’ comments about Polanyi, his claim is based on memories many years later. Certainly, Polanyi was commenting on ‘moral inversion’ and the disposition of literary intellectuals long before ‘Beyond Nihilism’. In Chapter 7 of Polanyi’s 1951 LL, there is a discussion of Central and Eastern European intelligentsia and nihilism visible in Russian literature (1951a: 103–6) and ‘moral inversion’ (1951a: 106). This LL chapter is linked to other recent essays (Polanyi, 1949a, 1950b), and the argument is akin to earlier essays such as ‘The English and the Continent’ (Polanyi, 1943). 12 Polanyi’s work on his film and the connection between economics education, the reform of economics, and social change is a recent topic in Polanyi scholarship treated illuminatingly by Eduardo Beira and Gabor Biro. See Beira’s essays (Beira, 2015, 2016) introducing two recently published Polanyi lectures from the 1930s leading to the film project. Beira has digitized Polanyi’s film and had the audio track translated into several languages (available at http:// polanyisociety.org). He has put together a set of Polanyi archival documents on the film project and has written several interesting working papers (also available at http://polanyisociety.org). Gabor Biro’s recently accepted dissertation, ‘Projecting the Light of Democracy: Michael Polanyi’s Efforts to Save Liberalism via an Economics Film, 1933–1948’ (Budapest University of Technology and Economics, 2017) is an extraordinarily comprehensive study that discusses the many dimensions of the Polanyi film project and his aspiration to reform and save liberalism. Like Beira, but even more extensively, Biro historically contextualizes Polanyi’s work, using documents in the MPP and



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other sources. My brief discussion below has many largely unspecifiable debts to the research of Beira and Biro. 13 Polanyi develops a clear conception of the economy and its place in human society and this is a component of his criticism of materialism. His recently published 1936 lecture says, ‘an economic system is, in general, a method to make a choice between the various uses of our materials and tools; a way to find out what we should do with things’ (Polanyi, [1936] 2015: 18). His 1945 Civitas journal proposal elaborates, saying ‘the fundamental aims of society are of the moral and intellectual order; to foster charity, justice and truth among men. The main practical task of society, and its most prominent activity, is to provide a framework for its members to make a living.’ The economic order is ‘the medium of moral achievement’ (MPP, B50, F5; see also Polanyi, 1946b: 83). 14 For a richer account, see the introduction to Polanyi’s Gifford Lectures (Mullins, 2014; available at http://polanyisociety.org), which synthesizes many things in the Polanyi biography (Scott and Moleski, 2005: 203–21) and other historical information. 15 Note also the final paragraph of Polanyi’s ‘Scientific Convictions and the Free Society’ published in 1950 in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: ‘We are entering in this century into a period requiring great readjustments. One of these is to learn once more to hold beliefs. Our own beliefs. The task is formidable, for we have been taught for centuries to hold as a belief only the residue which no doubt can conceivable assail. There is no such residue left today, and that is why the ability to believe with open eyes must once more be systematically re-acquired’ (Polanyi, 1950c: 42). 16 Scott and Moleski (2005: 217–19) briefly treat the Chicago episode, based primarily on Scott’s interview with Shils after Polanyi’s death. There is, however, much material about the visa problems and the resignation from the offered Chicago position in the ESP correspondence, and Shils apparently forgot some details. Shils received copies of letters and memos written by the university administration as well as things written by Magda and Michael Polanyi. Polanyi’s effort to secure a visa is laid out clearly in Polanyi 1952b (see discussion in the next paragraph). The Polanyi and Shils partnership working at the University of Chicago, including Polanyi’s early visa problems and the university’s role, is a complex topic that deserves more scrutiny. 17 Polanyi’s problems traveling to the United States persisted after the McCarthy era. In a long 7 October 1966 letter to Shils (ESP, MPF, B4), Polanyi complained that he continued to have trouble entering the United States because the State Department now classified him as a ‘defector’, which was merely one step removed from his earlier classification as a ‘communist’. Shils’ letter to Polanyi on 17 October 1966 (ESP, MPF, B4) indicates that he was taking bold steps to address Polanyi’s travel problems, including contacting a former University of Chicago law professor who had also served as US Attorney-General.

5

Shils, Mannheim, and ideology1 Christopher Adair-Toteff

Two names which are frequently associated with the concept of ideology are Edward Shils and Karl Mannheim.2 This is not only because Shils was co-translator (along with Louis Wirth) of Mannheim’s Ideologie und Utopie ([1929] 1936), but because Shils, like Mannheim, devoted much of his life to investigating this concept.3 Although Ideologie und Utopie is Mannheim’s most famous work on ideology, he also wrote a short, but important, article on this topic. Unlike Mannheim, Shils never wrote a major book on ideology; however, he did write a number of articles in which he laid out the findings of his theoretical and cultural investigations as well as warned about its consequences. Because Shils and Mannheim are two of the most-well-respected writers on the topic of ideology, it is surprising that their differences and similarities regarding the concept have not received the attention that they deserve. This chapter is intended to help rectify this unfortunate gap in our knowledge. The chapter is divided into four sections: in the first, I discuss the relationship between Edward Shils and Karl Mannheim; in the second, I examine Mannheim’s conception of ideology; in the third, I examine Shils’ conception of ideology and draw contrasts between their two approaches to ideology, and in the final section I take up the issue of the ‘end of ideology’. I point out that Shils never said that ideology was dead, only that some historical manifestations of it were. Thus, the claim that ‘ideology is dead’ was not only premature, but unwarranted. Since the issue of ideology is present, it is instructive to again consider the conceptions that Mannheim and Shils each had regarding the concept of ideology. Shils and Mannheim In a number of places Edward Shils wrote about how Karl Mannheim’s works were very influential in helping to form his early thinking. In the ‘Introduction’ to the first volume of his collected works (1972a), Shils wrote that during the 1930s he had read ‘the writings of Karl Mannheim



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and Max Weber’ (1972a: vii). Even during the Second World War Shils continued to have a rather favourable impression of Mannheim; he particularly liked Mannheim’s and Alfred Weber’s idea of the ‘Freischwebende Intelligenz’. This phrase indicated his hope that the independent-thinking intellectuals would come to dominate, but he did not ‘think it likely to occur’ (Shils, 1972a: viii). Shils became increasingly disenchanted with Mannheim’s theories, yet his assessment of Mannheim as a person continued to be rather positive. This raises a number of questions: when did Shils ‘turn away’ from Mannheim? What did Shils find in Mannheim’s thinking to prompt this turn? And why did Shils separate his opinion about Mannheim the thinker from Mannheim the person? In his obituary of Shils, Stephen Turner noted that Shils ‘became a friend of Mannheim’ and that like Mannheim, Shils did not want to give a ‘“sociological” account of the contents of science’. However, Turner stressed a fundamental difference between the two scholars when he emphasized that Shils ‘was actively engaged with scientists’ and that he ‘devoted much of his life to the advancement of the study of science’ (S. Turner, 1995: 397). The contrast that Turner emphasized is the one between Shils as a scholar who was the proponent of the study of science and Mannheim as a thinker who was ambivalent about the study of science, if not distrustful of science itself. Shils began to distance himself from his former intellectual partners and intellectual influences.4 This is shown in Shils’ 1957 article, ‘Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criticism of Mass Culture’ ([1957] 1972a). Shils described how Marxists, liberals, and many others had believed that once freed from the drudgery of everyday survival, people would begin to live elevated and cultured lives. Unfortunately, the mass culture of the twentieth century demonstrated that rather than being preoccupied with edifying arts, the masses were more than content with the less educational arts, as long as they were entertaining. Shils noted that the Marxists and former Marxist intellectuals were dismayed by this and maintained that the masses were ‘alienated and uprooted’ (Shils, [1957] 1972a: 258). Accordingly, this need for escape was driven by their desperate and isolated lives. Shils is not so much interested in whether this interpretation is correct, though he believes it is not; rather, his concern is with how ‘the socialist ideal’ and the ‘pristine Marxist outlook’ distorted the intellectuals’ approach to modern culture ([1957] 1972a: 251–3). He claimed that the critical interpretation of mass culture was based upon a longing for a past that never existed and ‘vague aspirations for an unrealizable ideal’ ([1957] 1972a: 255). Shils traces this longing to a romanticized version of the past; a communal one in which ‘traditions were stable’ and ‘there was unquestioned solidarity’ and ‘harmonious mutual respect’.

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Unfortunately, this is a ‘fantasy’ and one that can be traced in large measure to Ferdinand Tönnies and his Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Shils, [1957] 1972a: 257). It is the intellectuals themselves who are to blame, because they have set up an unrealistic expectation regarding what people should be doing with their lives (Shils, [1957] 1972a: 263–4). Shils notes that it was not just Tönnies, but Werner Sombart and even Georg Simmel who had some rather unrealistic expectations regarding modern life. Some American sociologists adopted this highly critical view of modern urban life; especially Louis Wirth and Robert E. Park. In a footnote, Shils suggests that this view ‘found its fullest expression in the writings of Robert Park’ and notes that it is also found in the views of his former collaborator Louis Wirth (Shils, [1957] 1972a: 257n26).5 The issue of Mannheim’s sensitivity is repeated in some of Shils’ later writings on Mannheim. It is found in Shils’ contribution to the special issue of Daedalus (1974) that was devoted to classics of the twentieth century. He began his article on Mannheim by stating that ‘Karl Mannheim was extraordinarily sensitive to his national and continental environment and to his own time’ (1974: 83). He also noted that Ideology and Utopia had been continuously in print for almost forty years and that it continued to be regarded as one of the classics of the twentieth century (1974: 89). Nonetheless, Shils did not offer a very positive assessment of the work; he claimed that Mannheim’s Hegelian roots helped blind him to the importance of the individual and he continued to labour under the spell of Marxism – even if he was ‘never an avowed Marxist’ (1974: 84, 86). The book was ‘full of contradictions and uncertainties’ and reflected Mannheim’s ‘derogatory attitude towards knowledge’ (Shils, 1974: 83, 88).6 As a historicist, Mannheim was wary about objective knowledge and as a sociologist of knowledge he distrusted the idea of facts. Shils observed that Mannheim indicated his ‘uneasiness’ about facts by always putting ‘facts’ in quotation marks (Shils, 1974: 85). Yet, Shils seemed to have approved of the distinction that Mannheim made between the sociology of knowledge and the ‘theory of ideology’ (1974: 85). Nonetheless, Shils contended that Mannheim’s theory of ideology failed because while it postulated an objective theory of truth, it also held that people failed to realize it. In particular, Shils contended that Mannheim never entirely shed his Marxist leanings, and that influenced his thinking (1974: 87). Rather than focusing on individual examples and discovering factual evidence, Mannheim offered worn-out theories and produced vague generalities. Shils objected to Mannheim’s distrust of the individual and his dislike of tradition and institutions. He further contended that ‘observation, erudition, or experiment had no place in Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge’ (1974: 86–8). Shils concluded with the observation that Mannheim’s own individual



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demeanour spoke against his ‘hopelessly wrong position’ (1974: 89). It is also possible that Shils took issue with Mannheim’s pursuit of a position in America. He undoubtedly knew about this because of his association with Wirth. And part of this may have been his awareness that many German sociologists disliked Ideologie und Utopie.7 The notion of Mannheim’s sensitivity occurs again in Shils’ 1995 essay ‘Karl Mannheim’ (1995a). In this, written shortly before his death, Shils’ approach towards Mannheim is much more measured than his earlier opinions. This has led Jefferson Pooley to suggest that in this essay Shils is ‘wistful and emotionally reverent’ and that it was likely written in such a type of ‘penance’ to atone for Shils’ earlier attacks on his ‘one-time intellectual idol’ (Pooley, 2007: 372, 380). While there is much to be said for this interpretation, it does not seem quite right on three counts. First, whatever harsh feelings that Shils had remained mostly private; his earlier writings on Mannheim are critical but cannot be regarded as attacks. Second, Shils’ 1995 essay is filled with the same sort of comments on Mannheim and his work; that Mannheim was an intelligent and sensitive person and his writings were powerful and often enlightening. However, Mannheim could not fit in in England and his work was ultimately unpersuasive. More important is the third; rather than being influenced by fellow Central European refugees, Shils’ turn against Mannheim began long before Shils went to England.8 Before attempting to argue for this third point, I need to set out Shils’ relationship with Mannheim. In the 1995 essay Shils recounted how he had heard the name Karl Mannheim but before 1932 had not read any of his writings (1995a: 222). During the winter he read Ideologie und Utopie, and while he was fascinated by its ‘daring grandiose ambition’, he was not ‘entirely persuaded’ by Mannheim’s claim regarding intellectuals and knowledge (Shils, 1995a: 222–3). Despite these misgivings, he became ‘an exhilarating devotee of Mannheim’ (Shils, 1995a: 223). Yet, when Shils was translating Ideologie und Utopie during 1934 it became clearer to him that Mannheim was not the intellectual saviour that he had expected. This was reinforced when Shils was corresponding with Mannheim – because it was increasingly clear that Mannheim was changing his work and its ideas to fit better with the Anglo-American audience. Shils wrote that Mannheim was unhappy at the London School of Economics (LSE) and he suggested that this was caused by two things. First, it was because of the real and perceived antipathy towards Mannheim by some, including his administrative supervisor, Morris Ginsburg. Second, because he was ‘sensitive’ to the fact that he was not a professor, but was only a ‘lecturer’ (Shils, 1995a: 226, 229, 232, 235). Shils also noted that Mannheim wanted to be regarded like another Kant, and while he does not say so, this must have struck Shils as being a bit too

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vain. Regardless, Shils seems to have lost his earlier enthusiasm for Mannheim by 1935 and he makes reference to this by indicating that it was then that Mannheim had ‘renounced his rich historical sociology’ and had turned towards his ideas about planning (Shils, 1995a: 228–9). Shils insisted that emigration was terrible for Mannheim and that Mannheim was often lonely. He also noted that Mannheim suffered from poor health and that wartime conditions in England only served to aggravate his suffering. Despite these problems, Mannheim was always polite and helpful towards Shils, and it is obvious that even if Shils grew to disapprove of Mannheim’s thought, he had respect for Mannheim as a man (Shils, 1995a: 233–5). That Shils had respect and even affection for Karl Mannheim as a person is clearly in evidence in A Fragment of a Sociological Autobiography (2006). Shils noted that Mannheim had him to thank for making him known to the world outside London but that Mannheim was ‘so generous’ to Shils (2006a: 35). They always got along well and each seemed to have genuine affection for the other (Shils, 2006a: 36). However, despite Shils’ initial enthusiasm for Mannheim’s writings, he quickly found himself disillusioned. One indication of this is to compare Shils’ views of other sociologists. Like Mannheim, Simmel ‘exhilarated’ the young Shils by asking, ‘Wie ist Gesellschaft möglich?’ (‘How is society possible?’), but was disappointed by Simmel’s answer, ‘through interaction’. As Shils put it: ‘It is like saying that a building is made up of bricks; that might be true but it does not say what a building is’ (2006a: 23).9 Shils allowed that Simmel was a ‘dazzler’ but complained that he was not a systematic thinker. All of these things that Shils wrote about Simmel apply equally to Mannheim. A similar type of comparison can be made between Frank H. Knight and Mannheim. Shils wrote that as a student he did not always understand Knight’s thinking but he always recognized that Knight possessed a strong sense of intellectual honesty. Shils regarded Knight as ‘a man who took the world seriously’ and who struggled to understand it’ (2006a: 28). Unlike Knight, Mannheim was unable to ‘see the world as it is’ and his concern was always with ‘how human beings should behave’ (Shils, 2006a: 28, 37). Shils admitted that he, like many young students, was thrilled by Mannheim; yet, neither he, nor they, could reformulate what Mannheim said (Shils, 2006a: 33). Shils attributed part of this to Mannheim’s Hungarian roots and some of it to his adherence to Marxism. Shils regarded Mannheim as a ‘brilliant and imaginative man’; but he confessed that he was hard-pressed to ‘formulate exactly what Mannheim believed’ (2006a: 34–5). Shils insisted that even while reading Ideologie und Utopie in 1933, he was ‘perplexed by Mannheim’s way of discussing ideology’ (Shils, 2006a). Rather than turning away from Mannheim in the 1940s,



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Shils had already turned away from him in the 1930s. A large part of this dissatisfaction stemmed from Mannheim’s treatment of ideology. In his article ‘Karl Mannheim’ (1968b) in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences Shils shares his ambivalence about Mann­ heim’s works. He noted that by and large Mannheim failed in his earlier attempts to revise epistemology in his sociology of knowledge and in his later discussions about education and democratic ideals (1968b: 556, 560). Mannheim also failed by dying without any real disciples and without much lasting influence.10 However, Shils makes it clear that these failures had much to do with Mannheim’s time and place and less to do with him and his thinking. Shils praised Mannheim for being an ‘extraordinarily stimulating teacher’ but he complained that Mannheim was often vague and ambiguous (Shils, 1968b: 560–1). Shils concluded by writing that Mannheim ‘dealt with very important subjects’ and the claim that ‘the mistakes of a distinguished mind are more interesting than the truths of a mediocre one was true of Mannheim’ (Shils, 1968b: 561). This can be said about a number of Mannheim’s ideas but it is certainly true regarding ideology. Shils noted that it was probably Mannheim who was the first person to draw attention to the notion of ideology. Mannheim on ideology Before Mannheim published Ideologie und Utopie (1929) he had published ‘Ideologische und soziologische Interpretation der geistigen Gebilde’ ([1926] 1982). Unlike many of the articles that Mannheim wrote during the 1920s, this was published in the new Jahrbuch für Soziologie and not the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. Also, unlike Ideologie und Utopie, which has attracted much, if not always positive, attention, this short article has been relatively neglected, even by Mannheim scholars.11 In this brief piece Mannheim makes references to numerous thinkers, including Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Paul Natorp, Wilhelm Windelband, Karl Marx, and Immanuel Kant. He mentions Kant in part because Kant argued that we should regard an object from two points of view: from a causal view and from a moral one – that way the laws of physics would be guaranteed, as well as human freedom and moral responsibility. Mannheim does not make references to two other and more contemporary approaches, Georg Jellinek’s double view of law from a legal and a sociological aspect and Hans Kelsen’s rejection of this distinction in favour of the purely legal perspective. In Mannheim’s case, the ‘mental object’ can be regarded in one of two ways, as an ‘idea’ or as an ‘ideology’.12 If it is regarded in the first way, then it is ‘from inside’; if it is regarded in the second way, then it is ‘from outside’

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(Mannheim, [1926] 1982: 214–17). He then differentiates between two methods of approaching ‘from outside’: the positivistic and the idealistic ([1926] 1982: 216–17). It is relatively obvious that Mannheim prefers the latter to the former, and this is supported by his reliance on Hegel ([1926] 1982: 218, 226). The final distinction that Mannheim makes is between the ‘systematic’ and the ‘genetic’. Although it is less obvious than in the other case, it appears that Mannheim prefers the genetic approach ([1926] 1982: 221–2, 225). Towards the end of the essay Mannheim provides a table designed to set out the differences in approaches. On one side there is the ‘systematic’, and he lists three approaches: the ‘subjective’ approach (Weber), the ‘objective’ approach (Neo-Kantian),13 and the ‘unhistorical’ (Plato) (Mannheim, [1926] 1982: 224). There is also the ‘genetic’ type of interpretation that can be divided into two types: from ‘sense’ (‘Sinngenetische’) or from ‘historical idea’ (‘Ideengeschichtliche’) (Mannheim, [1926] 1982: 225, 227). Then there is the other side, but Mannheim seems to have little interest in detailing it. His final conclusion is to draw our attention to the wide variety of interpretations regarding a ‘mental object’. Despite the initial interest in ideology, there is not much that is found here; however, Mannheim repeatedly refers to an ‘immanent ideological totality’ (‘immanenten ideologischen Totalität’) (Mannheim, [1926] 1982: 225, 227) that both looks back to Troeltsch’s ‘immanent historical totality’ from his Historismus und seine Probleme (1915–22) and Mannheim’s own 1924 article on historicism in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik), as well as looks forward to Ideologie und Utopie. Karl Mannheim first published Ideologie und Utopie in 1929 and it was composed of three parts. The first part was entitled ‘Ideologie und Utopie’ and carried a subtitle ‘Als Einleitung’. The second part had the title ‘Ist Politik als Wisssenschaft möglich?’and had the subtitle ‘Das Problem der Theorie und Praxis’. The third part was entitled ‘Das utopische Bewußtsein’. The first part ran to 66 pages whereas the second and third parts combined were more than 180 pages (Mannheim, 1929: 1–66, 67–168, 169–250). When it was published in English in 1936, it was a much altered book.14 First, with an additional index it was now more than 350 pages, and second, Mannheim added two additional sections. The first was an introduction entitled ‘Preliminary Approach to the Problem’ and the second was called ‘The Sociology of Knowledge’. This second addition was an English translation of Mannheim’s article in Alfred Vierkandt’s Handwörterbuch der Soziologie. The German edition is an odd book, but the English version is even odder: Bryan S. Turner called it an ‘unusual and strange text’ (B. Turner, 1995: 719). It is even stranger because during the time between the publication of the German original and the English version, Mannheim’s focus shifted from sociology of ideology to the



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sociology of knowledge.15 And, while the latter is interesting in its own right, the concern here is with the former.16 Mannheim began his discussion of ideology by insisting upon the need for a clarification of the concept. While it seems to be rather straightforward, it really is not because the term actually has two different meanings (Mannheim, 1929: 7). One is the ‘particular ideological concept’ (‘partikulare Ideologiebegriff’), while the second is the ‘total ideological concept’ (‘totale Ideologiebegriff’) (Mannheim, 1929: 8). This distinction, like many of Mannheim’s others, is not very clear; Kettler, Meja, and Stehr suggest that the distinction is between the intellectuals’ ‘distrust of purposive discourse’ and the ‘way of knowing’ (Kettler et al., 1984: 65). This reflects the distinction between the negative and the positive uses of ideology. Mannheim notes that ideology often functions to discredit the opponents, and he suggests that this is the predominant use. This connects with Mannheim’s notion of ‘unmasking’ (‘Enthüllung’); that is, revealing what the opponent’s true motives and real goals are. This notion leads to Mannheim’s repeated references to ‘false consciousness’ (‘falsche Bewußtsein’) (Mannheim, 1929: 16–17, 23–4, 31, 50, 52). This is the deception that one uses to mislead others (and sometimes oneself). Barboza suggests this deception occurs when one denounces the opponent’s ideas as being lies (Barboza, 2009: 93). Nonetheless, it is the positive function of the ‘total ideology’ to allow one to recognize not only the ideological ‘standpoint’ of one’s opponent, but also one’s own ideological ‘standpoint’ (Mannheim, 1929: 32). One of the important points to take away from this is to recognize the relativity of standpoints. This sense of relativism leads back to some ideas from Max Weber and in particular his notion of ‘value freedom’ (‘Wertfreiheit’). That this phrase has been often misunderstood is not relevant here; what is important is that it is another instance in which Mannheim adopts a phrase from Weber and then adapts it for his own purposes. Mannheim’s purpose here is to distinguish his new concept of ideology from the older one. He does so by insisting that unlike the older one, which held that values were absolute and eternal, the new one maintains that values are relative and are historically directed. In this sense, Mannheim is not just referring to Weber but to Ernst Troeltsch and his discussions of historicism and to Werner Sombart and his ideas about economies. But, Mannheim is also referring to Weber’s, Troeltsch’s, and Sombart’s critical approaches to Marxist ideology (Mannheim, 1929: 29, 37, 51). Mannheim objects to the Marxist insistence on ideological purity in the service of the proletariat and he suggests that some of the Marxist claim rests upon the Hegelian notion of the ‘false consciousness’ (Mannheim, 1929: 29). But he insists that the problem of ideology is much ‘too general’ to be continuously regarded as a privilege of a single party

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(Mannheim, 1929: 29–30). Mannheim draws a number of conclusions about ideology: that it does not necessarily lead to relativism, but it does lead to relationism, and that it is not identical to illusion but is related to it (Mannheim, 1929: 41, 55). He also concludes that ideology and utopia both strive for ‘reality’, but that both of them conflate their ideas (and ideals) of ‘reality’ with factual reality (Mannheim, 1929: 59). In Die Gegenwartsaufgaben der Soziologie, which was published in 1932, Mannheim again took up the concept of ideology. Here he differed from his discussion of it in Ideologie und Utopie in two ways; first, he considered ideology an integral part of the ‘political-juridical section’ (‘Politischjuristische Abteilung’) of sociology, which he called the ‘doctrine of ideology’ (‘Ideologienlehre’) (Mannheim, 1932: 60). Second, he objected to the insistence that ideology is found only in the political sphere and that it should always be regarded as negative. Instead, Mannheim argued that ideology is found in other areas of culture. Furthermore, it can, and often does, perform an important positive function, which is the process of the clarification of fundamental concepts, and by making more obvious the powers and interests that inform our everyday lives. In this, ideology helps us ‘live in truth and deal with reality’ (Mannheim, 1932: 18–19). Mannheim’s conception of ideology is not always clear or consistent, but it is always a source of interest; and that is likely the reason that Shils was intrigued by it. Shils on ideology Shils wrote often about ideology and his most important work on it was the article in the 1968 edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. While it is frequently referred to as ‘Ideology’, that is not the title that the encyclopaedia article carried. Instead, the title was ‘The Concept and Function of Ideology’ and it was one of two under the title ‘Ideology’.17 In a footnote to the later version of ‘Ideology’ that is found in The Intellectuals and the Powers there is a reference to the fact that Shils’ entry was ‘Previously published in a slightly different form’ (Shils, [1958c] 1972a: 23). The phrase ‘slightly different form’ is an understatement because a comparison between the 1968 encyclopaedia version and the 1972 book version reveals a remarkable number of additions, deletions, and changes. These range from the substitution of a word or two to wholesale additions and deletions of sentences. It also includes the rearrangement of the order of some of the subsections; in the encyclopaedia version, the section ‘The Bearers of Ideology’ follows ‘The Emergence of Ideologies’, whereas in the book version, ‘The Bearers of Ideology’ precedes ‘The Emergence of Ideologies’ (Shils, 1968a: 69; [1958c] 1972a: 28–9). Despite these



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differences the encyclopaedia entry and the journal article share a number of similarities, and these include the emphasis on definitions, clarification of consequences, and also the relative lack of references to Karl Mannheim’s conception of ideology. On the two occasions in which Shils does mention him, it is mostly to point out his disagreement with him. Shils defines ideology as a ‘comprehensive pattern of beliefs’ designed to help us understand the world. He notes its similarity to ‘outlooks’ and especially ‘creeds’ (Shils, [1958c] 1972a: 23). He suggests that the difference between ideologies and creeds is that the former are more authoritative and more focused. Later, he will minimize this difference and suggest that often the line between them is not so fixed (Shils, [1958c] 1972a: 33). Shils’ initial emphasis on the differences and then his later move to reduce those differences resemble the method that Weber often employed. This is not the only way in which Shils’ discussion of ideology is similar to that of Weber, and that is the similarity regarding ideology and charisma. Weber had maintained that the charismatic leader arises almost exclusively during times of crises; Shils contends that ideology surfaces also during times of unrest (Shils, [1958c] 1972a: 29). Shils contends that there can be a mixture of charisma and ideology – what he calls the ‘charismatic ideologist’– and he suggests that this individual is especially powerful as well as dangerous, because he possesses the non-intellectual power of the charismatic leader as well as the intellectual framework of the ideologist (Shils, [1958c] 1972a: 28). If people follow a charismatic leader because they believe in his God-given, personal power to overcome the crisis and to establish something new, people believe in an ideology because it appeals to their need for intellectual order and certainty of convictions. The need for an ideology comes about because of the desire for ‘an intellectually imposed order on the world’ and the need for ‘systematic completeness’ (Shils, [1958c] 1972a: 29–31). Ideologies are reactions against traditional authority which look backwards and are deemed too corrupt. Ideologies look forward to an ideal future and their adherents are regarded as necessarily pure (Shils, [1958c] 1972a: 25–9). The adherents believe that they are part of a special group and that they are arrayed against enemies. The reference is to Carl Schmitt’s friend–foe distinction (Shils, [1958c] 1972a: 35). However, as much as the ideology can be exceptionally attractive, there are forces which cause it to lose its attraction. Shils discusses several of these forces: (1) internal changes can mean that the ideology loses some of its purity, (2) external changes come from the nature of the world and force the ideology to conform to the facts, and (3) the lessening of the crisis means that the power of the ideology begins to wane (Shils, [1958c] 1972a: 31–2). Shils does not believe that this means the ‘end of ideology’; those who believed in this ‘end’ mistakenly regarded the decline in Marxist

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ideology to be the end of ideology in general. Instead, Shils argued that the tendency towards ideology is universal and timeless, although he stressed that the need for ideologies occurred primarily in the modern Western world (Shils, [1958c] 1972a: 27). The first time that Shils mentions Mannheim is when he utilizes Mannheim’s distinction between ideologies and utopias. Mannheim called ‘states of affairs’ that have never existed ‘utopias’ and he called ‘states of affairs’ that no longer exist ‘ideologies’. Shils’ point of using Mannheim was to underscore his claim that ideologies are ideals. Having mentioned Mannheim’s distinction, Shils immediately added that ‘Neither [Mannheim’s] terminology nor his classifications are adhered to in this paper’ (Shils, [1958c] 1972a: 25). The second time that Shils mentions Mannheim is in his discussion of the relationship between truth and ideology. According to Shils, Mannheim’s notion of ideology was rather Marxist and as such it was by its very nature ‘untruthful’. It was ‘untruthful’ because it ‘masked’ undeclared motives and hidden interests (Shils, [1958c] 1972a: 36). Shils, however, dis­ agrees with this assessment and insists that even though there is a tenuous relationship between ideology and the truth, ideologies tend to have some truthful propositions. Nonetheless, ideology does tend to conflict with truth and that is because of the insistence on the purity of beliefs that is insisted upon by the proponents of ideology (Shils, [1958c] 1972a: 37–8). Shils had provided an earlier and rather different account of ideology in his essay ‘Ideology and Civility’. First published in 1958, it is reprinted both in The Intellectual and the Powers and Other Essays ([1958b] 1972a) as well as in the collection edited by Steven Grosby bearing the title The Virtue of Civility (1997a). It differs from Shils’ encyclopaedia article in several respects; first, it is much longer and second, it is more polemical. If ‘Ideology’ can be regarded as a work of a scholar, then ‘Ideology and Civility’ can be considered almost a partisan piece. The later encyclopaedia article was a dispassionate account, whereas the earlier essay was almost polemical in both substance and in tone. Shils has a number of goals in this article and they include providing a history and an account of ideology, providing a warning about it and its influence, and finally, providing a means of ending the desire for ideologies and offering a much better and more positive alternative. Shils insisted that ideologies came about in the nineteen and twentieth centuries, and he offers several reasons for this. First, politics was traditionally the province of the few; most people did not have the leisure to participate nor had the desire to do so. Furthermore, the political struggles of the Greeks and the Romans were over interests and not ideologies (Shils, [1958b] 1972a: 48–9). However, the Reformation and its belief in the individual’s right to



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freedom of conscience helped foster independence of thought. Furthermore, the invention of the printing press ensured that more people could be exposed to more ideas (Shils, [1958b] 1972a: 49). Finally, the withering away of tradition and the loss of influence of religion meant that the two pillars of support that people relied on for support in the difficult struggles of life were weakened. Accordingly, the individuals ‘who find life as it is lived too hard’ are easily tempted by ideology (Shils, [1958b] 1972a: 54). As Shils pointed out, ideology is a substitute for religion and its adherents have a type of faith ([1958b] 1972a: 42–3). Adherents of an ideology are convinced that they, and they alone, ‘have the truth about the right ordering of life’ (Shils, [1958b] 1972a: 42). They see the world as corrupt and they regard it as being divided into the forces of good and the forces of evil. The current order is unjust and the authorities are diabolical in nature, thus there can be no compromise, political or otherwise (Shils, [1958b] 1972a: 43, 51). It is an ‘us against them’ mentality; ideological politics is the politics of friend against foe, clearly referring to Carl Schmitt’s famous distinction in Der Begriff des Politischen (Shils, [1958b] 1972a: 44). But, another reason for the rise in ideology was the rise of the intellectuals. They come in different forms with different inclinations; Shils singles out a number of different types. One is the adherent to ‘scientism’ who mistrusts tradition (Shils, [1958b] 1972a: 56). A second type is the Romantic who rejects the current order because it is impure and riddled with compromises (Shils, [1958b] 1972a: 57). Third is the populist who disregards the knowledge of the elites and believes in the wisdom of the lower classes (Shils, [1958b] 1972a: 58). These are the intellectuals who are drawn to ideology. However, Shils is convinced that there is an alternative to ideology and that is his notion of civility. As he puts it here, it is the ‘virtue of the citizen’ who believes in the common good ([1958b] 1972a: 60). Civil society is in many ways the opposite of ideology; whereas the adherent to ideology rejects tradition, order, authority, and embraces its opposites. In contrast, the member of civil society is someone who is reasonable, responsible, and prudent and is most agreeable to compromise (Shils, [1958b] 1972a: 57). Shils admits that the development of civil society will take time and effort and he allows that there is some inclination towards ideology because it is part of human society. Nonetheless, he is convinced that modernity, which gave rise to ideology, will provide much of the impetus for its decline ([1958b] Shils, 1972a: 48). ‘The End of Ideology?’ In his Preface to the collection of essays which make up The Form of Ideology Michael Oakeshott observed that the concept of ideology ‘is, or has

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become, a worthless concept’ (Oakeshott, 1980: viii). Yet, his remarks also served to show that his own observation was unwarranted. Oakeshott noted that ideological concerns frequently framed political discourse and influenced political action (1980: viii). Moreover, he noted that the essays on ideology collected in this volume shed considerable light on how ideology impacts not just on political thinking but on philosophy, religion, sociology, and other intellectual areas. Oakeshott objected to the denial of reality and the advancement of an unreal ideal. Raymond Aron had mentioned this approach in his ‘On the Proper Use of Ideologies’. This paper was included in the 1977 ‘Festschrift’ for Shils and in it Aron noted the connection between ideology and utopia. In doing so, he followed Mannheim, but in pointing out that they were fed not so much from a ‘vision of the future than by the unconditional rejection of the present’ he was voicing a view similar to Shils (Aron, 1977: 2). Like Shils, Aron believed there always seems to be a hunger for utopias, and that whenever one ‘seems to be refuted by events’ another one appears (Aron, 1977: 8). ‘On the Proper Use of Ideologies’ was not the only paper that Aron wrote on ideologies. There was an earlier one entitled ‘The End of the Ideological Age?’ Written in the 1950s, it was included in a 1968 volume entitled The End of Ideology Debate. In this paper Aron argued that throughout the modern age people have been guided by different ideologies. These included the ideologies that underpinned the American and French revolutions, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. Aron pointed to the ‘last great ideology’ which he suggested arose from a ‘combination of three elements’: a vision based upon human aspirations, the link between this vision and a specific social class, and a trust in a victorious future (Aron, 1968: 32). Aron pointed out that as much as there is talk about the proletariat and the working classes, the drivers of the modern revolutions have not been the workers, but intellectuals (1968: 34). In fact, all of the major modern ideologies (‘liberal, socialist, conservative or Marxist’) were developed and promoted by intellectuals (1968: 37). Aron had no illusions that desire for an ideology could ever be ended. However, he did harbour some hope that the belief in ideologies and utopias could be minimized; and he shared this hope with Shils. In ‘The End of Ideology?’ ([1955] 1968c) Shils commented on a major conference that was held in Italy in September 1955. The topic was ‘The Future of Freedom’ and was organized by Michael Polanyi, Sydney Hook, Raymond Aron, and N. Nabokov. Shils’ comments regarding the papers and the nature of their tone are interesting in their own right but the concern here is with his ideas about the end of ideology. Shils noted that the West had abandoned Nazi ideology and the Soviet one was under



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attack. He suggested that the inclination towards ideologies had declined and he argued that ideologies lay mostly in ruins. However, he noted that the human need for consistency in beliefs remained and he warned that there would be new temptations for new ideologies. Even the United States, which was not fundamentally inclined to ‘ideological extremism’, Shils saw it in the person of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his followers. In The Torment of Secrecy Shils insisted that ‘ideological extremism is the enemy of the privacy and publicity which support our liberties’ (Shils, 1956: 238). And he warned that the ‘ideological extremists’ are dangerous because of their ‘devotion to the ideal’.18 Shils did not dismiss the need for ideals, but he counselled finding a mean. The point was not that we have reached the ‘end of ideology’, as has been often maintained.19 Rather, that the old ones have died and we need to be careful about creating new ones (Shils, [1955] 1968c: 60–1). Unfortunately, many critics seemed to have overlooked this and thought that Shils was saying that the age of ideology had simply ended. He addressed this in A Fragment of a Sociological Autobiography where he wrote that what he meant about the end of ideology was that many of the supporters of Marxist ideology had lost their enthusiasm. Accordingly, he intentionally ‘placed a mark of interrogation’ in the title ‘The End of Ideology?’ to indicate that; not to signify the end of the ‘desire for ideological belief’ (Shils, 2006a: 92). Shils did not believe that humans could ever rid themselves of the desire for ideologies; their shorthand means for simplistic thinking are too appealing. Nonetheless, he thought their influence was pernicious and he opposed them to his notion of ‘civility’ (Shils, 2006a: 92). He also seemed to believe that they lulled individuals into thinking that they belonged to some type of community. Again, he contrasted that with his concept of civility. In ‘The Modern University and Liberal Democracy’ Shils defined ‘civility’ as ‘the concern for the common good’ (Shils, 1997c: 285). Shortly after providing this definition, Shils invoked Karl Mannheim; Mannheim believed that the ‘freischwebende’ intellectuals, those ‘detached intellectuals’, would be free from party affiliations and would be ‘capable of speaking for the common good’. Shils thought it unfortunate that Mannheim was roundly ridiculed for this belief (1997c: 285).20 Nonetheless, there are significant differences between Shils and Mannheim regarding ideology, and perhaps one of the most significant is that Mannheim seemed to use the concept of ideology primarily as a step towards his later sociological thinking. In contrast, Shils appeared to continue to believe that while ideologies may have been useful and at times even necessary, they are fundamentally problematic in relation to striving for the common good. With their similarities and even with their differences, Karl Mannheim and Edward Shils

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continue to provide some of the finest and most provocative accounts of the nature and the effects of ideology, and it is with considerable justification that the names Mannheim and Shils continue to be linked with the concept of ideology. Notes 1 My thanks to Stephen Turner and Steven Grosby for their generous advice on this topic and for their comments on previous drafts. 2 ‘Ideology’ is difficult to define. Chaim Waxman wrote, ‘Almost no two writers maintain the same definition’ (Waxman 1968: 3). Graeme Duncan wrote that there was ‘no agreed upon definition or theory of ideology’, and he attributed some of this to the fact that it has many meanings (1987: 649). Malcolm B. Hamilton listed twenty-seven different elements and concluded with a fiveline definition (1987: 38). No definition will be given here at the outset but will be discussed in the following sections. 3 The term ‘co-translators’ is a bit misleading. As David Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr pointed out in their book Karl Mannheim, Shils was really responsible for the translation, with only ‘nominal supervision’ by Wirth (1984: 112–13). In his A Fragment of a Sociological Autobiography Shils noted that ‘Wirth became a co-author without putting his pen to paper for more than his signature’ (2006a: 45). 4 Shils himself has suggested that he was already sceptical about these ideas in the 1930s. 5 Consider Shils’ similar comments about Tönnies and Wirth in ‘Primordial, Personal, Sacred, and Civil Ties’ (Shils, [1957] 1975a: 112–14). 6 One can add that Mannheim’s use of terminology was neither entirely clear nor consistent and he sometimes employed terms in ways in which they departed from common usage. A major example is his use of ‘utopia’ (‘Utopie’). See below. 7 See Kettler and Meja 1995: 200–12. 8 Pooley wrote that he drew ‘extensively’ on Shils’ 1995 piece; Pooley’s article was published in 2007 (2007: 380 and n47). It is possible that Pooley had not seen A Fragment of a Sociological Autobiography; if he had, he may have realized that Shils was already quite ambivalent about Mannheim in the mid-1930s. 9 In fairness to Simmel, Shils added that no one else could answer this question (Shils 2006a: 23). 10 One exception is probably Norbert Elias. 11 The article is barely mentioned by Kettler, Meja, and Stehr (1984), Loader (1985), and Barboza (2009). Shils apparently did not have much regard for this article for he mentions it only once, and that is when he wrote that as an undergraduate he had ‘not done more than look at Mannheim’s essays in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (1925), Das Problem einer



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Soziologie des Wissens, and in the Jahrbuch für Soziologie (1926), Ideologische und Soziologische Interpretation geistiger Gebilde’ (Shils, 2006a: 24–5). 12 ‘Spiritual construction’ (‘geistige Gebilde’) may be a better translation because Mannheim is talking about mental objects and not physical ones (Mannheim, [1926] 1982: 213). 13 To refer to the Neo-Kantian as ‘objective’ sounds odd, but Mannheim clarifies it with the Neo-Kantians’ claim ‘to have understood Kant better than Kant’ ([1926] 1982: 224). 14 Kettler, Meja, and Stehr pointed out that many of these changes were insisted upon by Mannheim himself (1984: 109–13). For a more recent and more detailed account see Kettler and Meja 1995: 213–16. 15 Colin Loader noted that the English version ‘lacks the focus, intensity, and the spirit of crisis that dominated the original edition’ and added that the English edition is the one most people are familiar with and is often regarded as ‘a treatise of the sociology of knowledge’ (Loader, 1985: 95). Kettler, Meja, and Stehr attribute the change to at least two related things: Mannheim’s interest in changing the book to reflect his Anglo-American audience and ‘redirecting the direction of the work’ (1984: 114). The change is from the sociology of ideology to the sociology of knowledge. Amalia Barboza insists that an additional factor accounts for the work’s unusualness and that is because Mannheim wrote different parts of the book from different perspectives. She also notes that there is another German edition which was first published in 1952 and was based upon the English version. Accordingly, it is a translation of the English version and is a retranslation of the original German. While I prefer to use the original German version because that is what Shils was familiar with and was the text that he translated, others like Barboza prefer to use the later German version because it includes more material (Barboza, 2009: 89–90 and n1). 16 Bryan Turner suggested that Ideology and Utopia was so influential that it gained him the ‘probably unwarranted title’ as the ‘“founder of the sociology of knowledge”’ (B. Turner, 1995: 718). There are many other themes that are intriguing but will be left aside here. These include how much Ideologie und Utopie was a response to Max Weber and whether the section on how politics is possible was a reply to Carl Schmitt. 17 Harry M. Johnson’s entry followed the one by Shils and was entitled ‘Ideology and the Social System’. 18 Shils, 1956: 231. He also insisted that ‘all extremists are inevitably ideological’ (1956: 234). 19 In ‘Observations on some Tribulations of Civility’ Shils clarified again that neither he nor Aron claimed that ideology had disappeared; what they did claim was that the ‘fervent self-confidence of its devotees had abated’. They both pointed to the decline in the enthusiasm for Marxist ideology (Shils, [1980] 1997a: 7). 20 Kettler, Meja, and Stehr make a number of crucially important points about Mannheim and the concept of ideology. First, they defend Mannheim against

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the charges of inconsistency by pointing out that Mannheim himself recognized publicly that his writings suffered from them. Second, they argue that he was struggling to find a new way of thinking. Third, they insist that Mannheim’s thinking was ‘conditioned by a strong sense of political responsibility’ (1984: 64). It was this sense of political responsibility that was undoubtedly one of the things that drew Shils to Mannheim, just as it always drew him to Max Weber.

6

Shils and Oakeshott Efraim Podoksik

Edward Shils, it is reported, was an admirer of the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901–90) (Pooley, 2007: 368). In the late 1940s Oakeshott was a prominent lecturer at the University of Cambridge, where he had been teaching history of political thought for over two decades. In 1950, after a brief stay in Oxford, he was invited to take the chair in political science at the London School of Economics (LSE) upon the death of Harold Laski. Shils was fond of the UK and spent much of his life teaching in its universities. In the course of his life he held appointments at the LSE and Cambridge. He was fascinated with the mores of British academic intelligentsia in the aftermath of the Second World War. In it he found those features which the American professoriate lacked. It had great confidence in its own society, it was integrated within the ruling elite, and it displayed high-culture tastes. The voices of bourgeois alienation had all but disappeared by the end of the war and ‘the culture which had now regained moral ascendancy’, while not being literally the culture of an active aristocracy or gentry, ‘was the culture traditionally inspired by those classes’. Its tone was ‘moderate, unspecialized and unobsessed, civil, restrained, diversified, and personally refined’ (Shils, [1955] 1972a: 146). Shils was especially influenced by a number of leading intellectuals who happened to live in the UK in the late 1940s. Stephen Turner (1999: 131) mentioned among them Oakeshott, T. S. Eliot, Michael Polanyi, Isaiah Berlin, Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Popper. These figures had a significant impact on Shils’ thinking, especially with respect to the debate on the plurality of values in modern society. Of them, Turner emphasized the influence of Eliot and Oakeshott, mentioning especially the latter’s 1947 essay ‘Rationalism in Politics’ (Oakeshott, [1947] 1962), which made the case for ‘the irreducibility of political activity to rules or explicit principles’. Jefferson Pooley challenged the chronology that lies at the basis of Turner’s suggestion. He doubted whether in the late 1940s Shils had been under any direct influence either from Eliot or Oakeshott. ‘There is very

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little indication’, he argued, ‘that either thinker entered the stream of Shils’ published thought until much later’ (Pooley, 2007: 367). Shils ‘seems to have never formed a friendship with either’ (368), as Oakeshott moved to the LSE only after Shils’ own tenure had ended there. Yet it is now proven that as early as 1949, before the sudden death in March 1950 of Harold Laski, to whose LSE chair Oakeshott would later be appointed, not only that Shils was aware of Oakeshott, but that he actually appeared to hold him in high regard, for he recommended him as a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, suggesting that there was ‘a good opportunity of getting him’.1 As for the indications of Oakeshott entering the stream of Shils’ published thought, here is one. In the article ‘Ideology and Civility’, first published in 1958, Shils criticized ideological politics for its unwillingness ‘to live from year to year and to keep afloat’ (Shils, [1958b] 1972a: 44). This expression – to keep afloat – is a clear allusion to the description by Oakeshott in his inaugural lecture, delivered in March 1951, of what he considered to be the proper view of political activity in contrast to ideological politics. Political activity, he said, was the enterprise ‘to keep afloat on an even keel’ (Oakeshott, 1962b: 127). This does not mean, of course, that Shils was in full agreement with Oakeshott on all matters. Thus Turner argued (1999: 136–7) that Shils diverged from thinkers like Oakeshott, Berlin, Eliot, and Popper, in the way he reflected on ideology. While those writers treated it dismissively as a kind of intellectual error, Shils, according to Turner, took it to be a deeply rooted phenomenon subject to sociological analysis. By and large, however, Shils, Oakeshott, and those other figures shared a common attitude towards the major questions of the time. This attitude can be described as anti-totalitarianism. Informed by the experience of the struggle against Fascism and facing the challenges presented by the Communist regimes and their fellow travellers in the West, anti-totalitarian intellectuals came together in their defence of the social and political institutions of Western liberal democracies against totalitarian attacks. They may have varied in the degree of their sympathy towards the actually existing liberal societies. Some were more critical than others. Yet all of them believed in the inherent superiority of the liberal way of life. Some of them, like Popper, Berlin, Jacob Talmon, Raymond Aron, and Hannah Arendt, were very passionate in the debates of the day. Shils and Oakeshott were less so. Thus Oakeshott, except for a brief period in the late 1940s and early 1950s, generally abstained from writing on topical issues, feeling uncomfortable with the interference by intellectuals in matters of public policy. As for Shils, he was perhaps less of a polemicist



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than others. His writings are on the whole too scholarly, and the tone all too civil. Nevertheless, both thinkers played a significant role in the exchange of ideas among the anti-totalitarians. Thus Shils was an important member of the anti-totalitarian milieu, maintaining personal and professional contacts with many of the leading anti-totalitarian figures of his generation, especially through the activities of founding and editing the journal Minerva and participating in the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Oakeshott likewise was the editor of the Cambridge Journal, and followed closely and commented on the work of his peers, with some of whom, such as Hayek, he maintained personal contact. His own philosophical ideas were clearly marked by the anti-totalitarian outlook (see O’Sullivan, 1999). In this chapter, I will attempt to bring Shils and Oakeshott together in the context of the anti-totalitarian tradition. Such analysis can be seen as a contribution to the study of the inner dynamics within anti-totalitarianism, an intellectual current which was not devoid of its own complexities, contradictions, and schisms. Specifically, I will examine these two thinkers in three respects. First, I will point to those aspects of their worldviews which they share in common with other anti-totalitarians. Afterwards, I will proceed to those aspects of their thought which appear to put them apart from many of their anti-totalitarian fellows. Finally, I will comment on what I regard to be the principal differences between the two. Shils, Oakeshott, and the notion of planning The anti-totalitarian thought of the post-war period was generally characterized by the opposition to the idea of regulating society by planning, by the rejection of ideological politics, and by the perception of similarity, if not identity, between the left-wing and right-wing radicalisms. Oakeshott’s and Shils’s positions fit this description. First, both were sceptical towards the idea of ‘planning’ as the recommended way to reorganize and regulate the life of a society. The debate on planning was triggered by the publication in 1935 of Karl Mannheim’s Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction and its translation into English in 1940. Shils was the translator of the work, but he later distanced himself from Mannheim’s ideas. Among the most famous participants in the debate were Hayek and Popper. In his Road to Serfdom Hayek (1944) rejected planning altogether. Popper (1950: 154–60) took a seemingly more moderate line, speaking of the advantages of incremental social engineering. But he was no less than Hayek allergic to any attempts of the radical top-down transformation of society. Interestingly, planning was on

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Oakeshott’s mind even before the publication of the English translation of Mannheim’s work. In 1939 he spoke critically of the doctrines ‘which hand over to the arbitrary will of a society’s self-appointed leaders the planning of its entire life’ (Oakeshott, 1940: xxii). Second, they were opposed to the kind of politics that was usually served by planning: the ideological one. Whereas planning was the tool of mobilizing a society in a concerted effort, ideology prescribed the goal for this effort. Elaborate ideology was considered by anti-totalitarians as an essential characteristic of all totalitarian regimes, as well as of their sympathizers in liberal democracies (Friedrich and Brzezinski, 1965: 22). Ideological delusion was severely criticized, sometimes under its own name (e.g. Aron, 1957), and sometimes under some other term that referred to the same phenomenon, such as Popper’s ‘historicism’ (Popper, 1957). Oakeshott and Shils joined the effort, and some of their better-known publications are dedicated to the critique of ideology (e.g. Oakeshott, 1962b; Shils, [1968] 1972a). Often alternatives to ideology were suggested, some more idiosyncratic than others. Arendt (1959), for example, envisioned the ideal of free foundational political action, modelled on her interpretation of politics in ancient Greece. A safer choice, however, was to remain within the universe of political modernity, but to interpret it as the condition of plurality of values. Such plurality was most famously propagated by Isaiah Berlin (1969). But it also plays a significant role in Oakeshott’s and Shils’s thought. Both thinkers considered plurality to be the fundamental feature of modern civilization. This plurality reveals itself in two aspects of the modern life. First, the social dynamics of modern society is pluralistic at its core (see Shils, [1997d] 1997a: 330; Oakeshott, 1962a: 184–5). Society consists of persons of different dispositions and beliefs engaged in a variety of undertakings. Second, the modern mind produced a variety of autonomous worldviews, prompted, as Shils notes (1980c: 65), by the separation ‘of the various spheres of life in the liberal society of the nineteenth century’. This feature of modernity was philosophically conceptualized by Oakeshott as the radical plurality of ‘modes of experience’ (Podoksik, 2003: 51–6). According to Steven Grosby (1997: xi), Shils’s ‘Primordial, Personal, Sacred, and Civil Ties’ ([1957] 1975a) and Oakeshott’s ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’ (1962e), together with Max Weber’s ‘Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions’ (1946), are the three most significant statements in the twentieth century in favour of ‘the plurality of orientation in human affairs’. Finally, since planning and ideology as such were considered as inimical to free society, any specific difference between their various forms became irrelevant. Anti-totalitarians substituted the traditional divide between



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the ideological Right and Left with the distinction between the totalitarian and moderate (liberal) politics. The emphasis on the fundamental affinity between different totalitarian regimes and ideologies, the specific differences between them be what they may, is a major characteristic of the anti-totalitarian tradition. This outlook was also shared by Oakeshott and Shils. Thus, already in the late 1930s, Oakeshott argued (1940: xxii) that there was a fundamental gap between two types of doctrines. On the one hand, as already quoted, there were those ‘which hand over to the arbitrary will of a society’s self-appointed leaders the planning of its entire life’. Such were Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism. And there were others, such as Catholicism and representative democracy, ‘which not only refuse to hand over the destiny of a society to any set of officials but also consider the whole notion of planning the destiny of a society to be both stupid and immoral’. Shils similarly argued that there are principal similarities between the radical Right and Left, for example, in his critique (Shils, 1954a) of Theodor Adorno’s study on authoritarian personality (1950), which was taken to be directed exclusively against the authoritarian instincts of the right wing. Shils, Oakeshott, and liberalism Anti-totalitarians were generally of the same mind regarding their opposition to the totalitarian threat from the Left and Right and their identification of its symptoms with planning and ideology. They also shared a general view of the society they tried to protect. This was a liberal society broadly conceived that allowed pluralism of opinion and that conducted its affairs with moderation (Crăiuţu, 2017) and a minimal degree of violence. But when it came to the particulars of their visions of society, the anti-totalitarians were indeed a broad church. Some among them had a fairly socialist mindset (Talmon), or at least professed some sympathy towards social democracy (Popper or Berlin) or continental European corporatism (Aron); others believed in the minimal free-market state (Hayek). Yet others were exploring the models of the past, drawing inspiration from Christianity (Eliot), ancient republican Greece (Arendt), or classical moral philosophy (Strauss). None of those was the position of Shils. Within this mosaic of opinion Shils appears to occupy a peculiar place, and the thinker to whom he appears to stand closest is Oakeshott. Shils’ and Oakeshott’s position can be described as follows. On the one hand, in their practical attitudes they come close to the free-marketeers who believed in the spontaneous order of society and the minimal intervention of the state. They adhered to the values of freedom and individuality without reservation. Yet, on the other hand, their theoretical

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understanding of man and society was not based on the familiar liberal principles that promulgated society based on ‘equal liberty’, to use the Spencerian expression. Society, they both acknowledged, cannot be conceived without taking into account the notions of tradition, consensus, and hierarchy. The inclusion of these notions was not a matter of compromise. Nor was their function purely auxiliary at the service of the ideal of freedom (as perhaps it was for Hayek). Rather, those conservative aspects had to be acknowledged as an essential part of human experience. They had to be understood as embedded in the modern way of life, if this life were to be recognized as free. In other words, unlike in ‘pre-modernists’ such as Strauss and Eliot, the conservative components in the views of Shils and Oakeshott carried in themselves the affirmation rather than limitation of liberalism. Their liberalism was thus of a peculiar vein, not fitting easily into the accepted meaning. Shils once distinguished between two types of liberalism in American society of the twentieth century. One was ‘collectivist’. In sentiment it stood close to the socialistic and revolutionary radicalism (Shils, [1978] 1997a: 125). This form of liberalism became the prevalent type in the United States. The other, to which Shils himself was more sympathetic, was a more classical version, called ‘autonomist’. Autonomist liberalism was on the whole less antagonistic to tradition than the collectivistic one. But at its core it was against tradition too, and like the collectivist liberalism, the autonomist one was inclined to rationalism (Shils, [1978] 1997a: 126). For this reason Shils did not subscribe to the classical version of liberalism unambiguously. For Shils, freedom could stand on its own feet only when supported by its apparent rival: tradition. The title of one of Shils’ essays emphasizes the complex relationship between the two: ‘Tradition and Liberty: Antinomy and Interdependence’ ([1958d] 1997a). Neither did Oakeshott give a pass to classical liberalism. Like Shils, he was indeed hostile to the progressivist liberalism, the one that was not aware of who liberalism’s real friends were (Oakeshott, 1962c: 38). But on occasions he criticized the older types of liberalism as well. Thus he listed Locke’s political theory and the political projects of the US founders among examples of rationalism (Oakeshott, [1947] 1962: 25, 27–8). Both Oakeshott and Shils laboured to understand the phenomenon of tradition and to rehabilitate it. Both believed that under attacks from the adepts of progress tradition came to be misunderstood. Progressivists relegated tradition to the realm of dead irrational norms seen as merely obstacles on the way of unprejudiced reason, obstacles which hinder the path to human liberation. But this picture was plain wrong. First, tradition understood as the transmission of practices through generations is a major



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and indispensable component of human life. And moreover, it is less rigid or inimical to free spontaneity than is generally perceived. Thus, for Oakeshott, traditional knowledge – the knowledge of how – is the fundamental aspect of every activity, and it is the one which endows an activity with a great degree of flexibility. As he argued, with respect to the morality of habit: First, there is in it nothing that is absolutely fixed … . Custom is always adaptable and susceptible to the nuance of the situation … . And anyone who has studied a tradition of customary behaviour (or a tradition of any other sort) knows that both rigidity and instability are foreign to its character. And secondly, this form of the moral life is capable of change as well as of local variation. Indeed, no traditional way of behaviour, no traditional skill, ever remains fixed; its history is one of continuous change. It is true that the change it admits is neither great nor sudden; but then revolutionary change is usually the product of the eventual overthrow of an aversion from change, and is characteristic of something that has few internal resources of change … . Like prices in a free market, habits of moral conduct show no revolutionary changes because they are never at rest. (Oakeshott, 1962d: 64–5)

Intimate knowledge of one’s own tradition thus provides an agent with the sensitivity to nuances and the ability to adjust to a great variety of circumstances. Shils too recognized the significance of tradition (Shils, 1981a). For him, tradition was not something obsolete to be immediately disposed of, but an inherent aspect of the human condition, almost an omnipresent phenomenon. Clearly in agreement with Oakeshott, he argued that basically every human activity involves aspects of traditionally transmitted behaviour. This is true even of science, which as an activity possesses traditions of its own. Here both thinkers were indebted to the work of Michael Polanyi, whose Science, Faith, and Society (1946b) they both approvingly mentioned in the context of their discussion of science (Oakeshott, 1947 (1962: 8n; Shils, 1981a: 116–17). Both considered scientism – the idea that social problems can and should be solved by means of applied scientific knowledge – as actually a perversion of the true scientific spirit (Oakeshott, [1947] 1962: 30; Shils [1980] 1997a: 11–12). Nor is tradition the enemy of individuality. Shils argued: Tradition is not the dead hand of the past but rather the hand of the gardener, which nourishes and elicits tendencies of judgment which would otherwise not be strong enough to emerge on their own. In this respect tradition is an encouragement to incipient individuality rather than its enemy. It is a stimulant to moral judgment and self-discipline rather than an opiate. (Shils [1958d] 1997a: 107)

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Indeed, both Shils and Oakeshott can be considered as the followers of the nineteenth-century liberal sociology in respect of its view of individuality as the result of a long-term historical process out of which individualistic modernity emerged (Oakeshott, 1991). Both of course adhered to liberal individualism. Yet neither can be described as an atomistic individualist. For both, true individualism was thinkable only within the framework of social, or interhuman, interactions. Thus Shils formulated the notion of consensus as the regulative idea of social dynamics. He understood it not as a rigid structure imposed from above, but as mutual sociability emerging in the process of interaction and dialogue. Such an interaction was even recommended by him for the very process of investigating society. A sociologist, he believed, should engage in conversation with the subjects of his investigation: Sociology will not make any serious progress as long as it proceeds on the basis of a belief that a ‘stimulus-response’ model, however ingenious, is adequate for understanding … . Sociological theory, even in its present rudimentary state, is not just a theory like any other theory; it is also a social relationship between the theorist and the subject-matter of his theory. It is a relationship grounded in the sense of affinity … . The understanding of the social system which it conveys … would, if it were ‘applied’, work through collective self-transformations. Collective self-transformations are those which would be decided upon consensually, by tacit understanding and deliberation, and in which the adaptations of the actions of individual to individual would be made within the context of a perceived affinity. (Shils, 1980c: 37–8)

Oakeshott did not use the term consensus. He preferred vaguer expressions, such as the flow of sympathy in tradition. But his basic view was similar to that of Shils. He rejected homogeneous solidarity. But he considered the mutual accommodation of arrangements and practices to be essential for human association. In his younger years, when Oakeshott was under the influence of Hegelian Idealism, he was quite suspicious of individualism in general (e.g. Oakeshott, 2007c: 254–6). In his later years he adopted much of the individualistic language. Yet his individualism was never confined to the individual in abstracto. Rather, his individual emerged out of the intergenerational web of interactions, and only in this context could free agency have any meaning. Oakeshott used the term ‘practice’ to denote the regularity of such interactions. He defined practice as ‘a set of considerations, manners, uses, observances, customs, standards, canon’s maxims, principles, rules, and offices specifying useful procedures or denoting obligations or duties which relate to human actions and utterances’ (Oakeshott, 1975: 55).



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Thus, as with the apparent contrast between freedom and tradition, in the case of the contrast between individuality and society both thinkers took, on the one hand, a radical stance: they spoke in support of liberal individuality. On the other hand, however, and contrary to the intuition of some of their anti-totalitarian fellows, they did not believe that individuality could exist by itself and in isolation from social practices surrounding it. Oakeshott’s sympathies may have moved away from Hegel to Hobbes in his later years. But he always professed great respect for Hegel (Oakeshott, 1975: 257–63) and would never accept Popper’s characterization of him as an enemy of open society. Now, in a similar manner, Oakeshott and Shils treated a related contrast between hierarchy and equality. The equality of rank and dignity (not to be confused with economic equality) is the pre-eminent value of the liberal worldview; inequality, or social hierarchy, belongs to the pre-modern set of values. For Shils and Oakeshott, free modern society presupposed the fundamental equality of citizens. Oakeshott considered civil association (which was his ideal free state) to be ‘a relationship of equals’ (Oakeshott, 1975: 121). And yet both admitted that social dynamics could never be fully egalitarian. There are in it moments of leading and following, ruling and being ruled, standing closer to and farther from the centre of authority. Oakeshott (1975: 183) spoke about ‘assent to authority’ required of the members of an association; Shils ([1975d] 1975a) studied the phenomenon of deference. Indeed, one of Shils’ major contributions to sociological theory was his notion of centre and periphery. This notion retained its meaning even in modern societies, despite their tendency towards equalizing. Although ‘the expansion of individuality attendant on the growth of individual freedom and opportunity, and the greater density of communications, have contributed greatly to narrowing the range of inequality’, yet ‘some persons will always be a bit closer to the centre; some will always be more distant from the centre’ (Shils, [1975c] 1975a: 16). In other words, the fundamental reality of hierarchy will never be absent from a society. The dialectic of equality and inequality may even be implied in Shils’ dealing with the concept of civility, one of his favourite topics. There are two meanings to the word, he argued. One is politeness, good manners, courtesy; the other is acting for the good of society as a whole, participating in collective self-consciousness (Shils, [1997d] 1997a: 338–43). But these two meanings, we could say, have roots in two different sets of values. Courtesy originates in the world of deference, pre-modern inequality. Civic commitment belongs to the word of republican fraternity with its postulate of fundamental equality. These two meanings are just another

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version of the contrast between manners and morals. Yet for Shils they were not opposites. He believed that without some degree of politeness no civil commitment could exist. Here too the fundamentally modern ideal is dependent on the traditional underpinnings. This is, then, the manner of thinking which was common to Oakeshott and Shils. Both were committed to the anti-totalitarian ideal of free society. Yet both were critical of the propensity to turn this ideal into a set of abstract formulae unrelated to the fundamentals of human interaction. They believed that the affirmation of freedom, individuality, and civil robustness were not only compatible with but even actively required respect for tradition, sociability, and politeness. And they believed so without any fear that this complexity would be misinterpreted and play into the hands of the enemies of open society. Their writings displayed genuine commitment to the free way of life. And the reason why the emphasis on tradition did not sound as dissonance to this commitment was an additional moment that they shared in common: their attachment to the importance of learning and their aptitude to attribute to the social life as a whole the peculiarities of the life of learning. Oakeshott and Shils were committed and passionate teachers. Not only did they spend most of their lives in teaching generations after generations of students (this was true of many other public intellectuals of the time), but they also were self-reflecting teachers who thought much and deeply on the meaning of the activity of education. Many of their essays deal directly with this subject (Oakeshott, 1989; Shils, 1997c). They considered the modern university to be the place of liberal education and the cornerstone of free civilization. And liberal education, in their view, was impossible except by the combination of liberal and conservative principles. For it presupposes initiation into the inheritance of the existing intellectual and cultural traditions, on the one hand, and creative engagement with those traditions, on the other. Learning requires recognition of the authority of the teacher. But at the same time it requires free assent and participation of the learner. For learning is never a passive social process; it is an active individual occurrence on the basis of reciprocity. One of the disadvantages of the mass university is, for example, that it leaves students in isolation from other students and from teachers (Shils, [1982] 1997c: 18). But learning is not confined solely to the formal institutions of education. In a certain sense, the world of human interactions as a whole can be understood as the world of learning. As Oakeshott suggested (1975: 55), ‘the relationship postulated in conduct inter homines is an understood relationship, capable of being engaged in only in virtue of having been learned’. The entire world of human relationships is thus one in which



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minds communicate with each other, respond to each other, and learn from each other. And if this is so, then the virtues of liberal university education can be taken to symbolize the virtues of any flourishing society. If a university community is conducted on the principles of conversation and civility, if it is founded on the respect of tradition as well as free inquiry, then the social life in general should reflect those principles. Freedom and tradition thus appear not as rivals, but as allies. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that Oakeshott’s and Shils’ experience as university educators and their great valuation of this experience had an impact on the way they envisioned good society. Differences between Shils and Oakeshott I have so far illustrated important points of affinity between Oakeshott and Shils. Both were public intellectuals who contributed significantly to the twentieth-century anti-totalitarian discourse; both were highly critical of the progressivist tendencies among the Western intelligentsia; and both believed that the strength of Western civilization was based on two pillars: freedom and tradition. All these considerations could be good reasons for assuming that the two thinkers represented more or less the same intellectual disposition. Yet this is the conclusion that I would wish to avoid. In this section, I would like to offer an argument as to why, despite significant similarities between them, Oakeshott and Shils cannot be seen as occupying the same slot in the twentieth-century ideological battles. Some points of difference between the two – in background, temperament, and professional identity – are as obvious as they are trifling. Indeed, one was a somewhat eccentric English don who considered himself a philosopher and was often scornful of the claims of social sciences, whereas the other was a conscientious American academic fully committed to the scholarly pursuit of the discipline of sociology. Intellectual history knows of much more surprising stories of spiritual affinity. What in my view really puts them apart is the difference in cultural outlook and its impact on the way in which they conducted their respective battles for civilization and the free way of life. This brings me to one of my earlier studies (Podoksik, 2008), in which I juxtaposed Oakeshott with another anti-totalitarian intellectual, Jacob Talmon. In that study I referred to the peculiar place Oakeshott took within the anti-totalitarian discourse. What characterized Oakeshott was his deep confidence in the destiny of the Western liberal civilization, in contrast with the doubts and anxieties of Talmon and many others. Quite surprisingly, lack of confidence was common among anti-totalitarians. Many of them absorbed elements of the critique against the very

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civilization they defended, be it the socialist or Fascist critique. And many of them tended at times to suspect that the alternatives to liberal modernity were stronger and more vital than this modernity itself. Popper, for example, had some kind words to say about Karl Marx, whereas Arendt was very impressed by the Soviet Sputnik (Podoksik, 2008: 218). One would expect, however, that this should not be the case with Shils. For even in his earlier period, when he was under the influence of Karl Mannheim, he never espoused truly radical beliefs, and even his moderate progressivism of that time evaporated quite quickly. Nor was he under any significant influence from the right-wing European anti-liberalism, as Strauss and Arendt perhaps were. And indeed his commitment to free society was never compromised by slippages such as praising the Sputnik. Nevertheless, his liberal convictions did not protect him completely from the lack of confidence and some kind of alienation. He strongly disliked political and social radicalism. But in response to it he usually played defence. He himself admitted that his views ‘have not moved with the times but rather against them’ (Shils, [1980] 1997a: 21). Shils was not a conservative. In fact, he saw himself as a liberal of the Chicago school (Jumonville, 1990: 168). But in his polemics against radicals he sounded as a paradigmatic conservative, a custodian of the boring and unappealing past. Oakeshott, by contrast, was content to be branded as conservative, while disliking the term liberal. Yet his writings look both more liberal and more at peace with his times. Instead of mourning the times, he possessed the audacity to claim the times for himself. He wrote and spoke as if the radicals and rebels were those who belonged to the dustbin of history, and not Western civilization. What accounts for this difference? It appears to me that Shils’ alienation resulted paradoxically from that very feature of his cultural and moral outlook which at first glance should have protected him from it: decency and respectability. The emphasis on respectability is present in the content and style of almost all of his works. But it is especially salient when he addresses two issues: culture and contemporary mores. With regard to culture Shils believed in a clear hierarchy of levels. Levels of culture are measured, according to him, by ‘aesthetic, intellectual, and moral standards’. He classified three such levels: superior or refined culture, mediocre culture, and brutal culture (Shils, [1972d] 1972a: 232). This does not mean that Shils castigates the inferior types of culture. On the contrary: his attitude to them was pre-eminently decent. He introduced this division in order to disagree with the snobbish rejection of modern society as plagued by mass culture. He even admitted that brutal culture had its social functions and sometimes produced worthy items.



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But in his general attitude to culture there was a clear gradation of the standards of taste, and he uses it to judge the state of the American culture of the day: The near illiteracy of some of the better American newspapers, the oftentimes fatuous barbarism of our weeklies and our one widely circulated fortnightly, the unletteredness of many of our civil servants, the poverty of our bookshops, the vulgarity of our publishers (or at least those who write their jacket blurbs and their advertising copy) can give little comfort. (Shils, [1972d] 1972a: 243)

Hierarchy of standards was also present when he spoke about the mores, especially in the sphere of sexuality. This subject preoccupied him more and more, as in the 1960s and 1970s libertinism burst into life. And this was one of the few topics in which he appeared to lose his temper and civility. Thus he mentioned ‘the laudation of civil and sexual perversity among literary men and academics in the “human sciences”’ (Shils, [1972d] 1972a: 243–4). He describes social scientists as virtually agents of immorality: The explanatory drift of the social sciences often runs against the drift of traditional moral beliefs; nowhere is this more true than with respect to the interpretation of criminal and delinquent—now, significantly, called ‘deviant’—conduct … . In matters of policy, many social scientists have for a long time been progressivistic in their ideas about the right direction of society. They have usually favoured governmental programs which increase the provision of goods, services, and opportunities for the poorer classes of society, they have been sympathetic with criminals and delinquents, critical of the police and other agents of order, they have been critical of traditional morality in familial and sexual matters. (Shils, 1980b: 280)

And he was repelled by the extension of the notion of liberalism towards the acceptance of deviant practices, relating to sexuality, such as pornography: The liberal defenders of pornography have extended liberalism to justify actions and works that were not intended to enjoy the benefits of a liberal regime. They have done so effectively, to the extent that any proposal for the censorship of pornographic works and of acts of public indecency is avoided by liberals for fear that they would thereby show themselves to be illiberal. (Shils [1978] 1997a: 150–1)

He considered the opponents of traditional morality as enemies of the liberal democratic order. ‘The programme of sexual emancipation, i.e. the prizing of sexual experience as the highest good, with heterosexuality and the traditional family of husband, wife and children as the obstacles to be eliminated’ was joined, according to him, by the hostility to whites and hatred of capitalism. ‘Civil society is of no value to emancipationists; it is

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no more than the opportunity to work against the liberal democratic order of society’ (Shils, [1980] 1997a: 15–16). Now, this respectability had a double effect. First, as the new cultural, moral, and sexual mores became entrenched in the liberal society, Shils could not but feel alienation from the times and from that very liberal order to which he felt attached. Second, he took at face value the pretence of anti-liberals to be emancipationist, and the only answer to radicalism he could envision was even more respectability. This precluded any form of effective intellectual resistance. I would like to illustrate this claim with one example. Shils was a great believer in the Humboldtian model of university based on the unity of teaching and research and disinterested pursuit of knowledge. In 1982 he published a long report on academic ethic (Shils, [1982] 1997c), in which he examined the challenges that the Humboldtian university faced in the contemporary society and recommended ways to cope with those challenges. Thus he identified as one of the problems an excessive emphasis on publishing, which actually does more harm than good both to university as the place of teaching and to the quality of scientific work it produces. But his response to this problem was to accept it as inevitability: ‘Yet the situation is hard to overcome. Research should be published if it meets the standards of responsible referees. Under present arrangements of financial support, every project which is supported has to culminate in publication’ (Shils, [1982] 1997c: 51). In this case, as in many others where structural bureaucratic considerations play their role, Shils simply conceded ground to the existing habits, only seeking to mitigate their effect. There was indeed one issue on which he was not prepared to compromise: affirmative action. That policy was advanced not out of structural constraints but out of radical ideological considerations, and Shils was sharply opposed to ideological policies. Yet as a social theorist and an observer of sociological dynamics in the universities, Shils knew well that technocratic and ideological attitudes were not necessarily incompatible. Consider, for example, his account of the symbiosis of the technological and oppositional trends in sociology: ‘since empirical research is now so widely taught and practiced and since technological society provides for the employment of so many sociologists, technological sociology and oppositional sociology have settled down together very comfortably’ (Shils, 1980c: 48). And if this is the case, then concession to the one is inevitably concession to the other. A university bureaucrat who pushes for the increase of the number of publications out of financial considerations will be the same bureaucrat who will push for affirmative action. Unwillingness to offer a radical alternative to the issue of bureaucratization will inevitably prevent one from effectively opposing ideologization.



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The politics of decency and respectability might help one win battles on the local level, as these qualities have their strongest impact in the sphere of personal contact. Indeed Shils’ own University of Chicago has so far fared much better than many others in respect of protecting the principles of free scholarly inquiry. But as a broader audience is concerned, bourgeois respectability is rarely an appealing form of argument. Now, if we turn to Oakeshott, then the first thing to say about him is that his cultural tastes and sympathies were in many respects similar to Shils’. He certainly was not a lover of counter-culture, and he was equally repelled by the vulgar libertinism of the New Left of the 1960s. Occasionally he even could sound as a moral traditionalist, for example, when he mourned the weakening of parental authority (Oakeshott, [1947] 1962: 36). But he never said anything similar to the diatribes against perversion quoted above. The reason was, I believe, that Oakeshott shunned bourgeois respectability no less than vulgar radicalism. Shils evaluated culture in terms of standards of taste. One of the most famous proponents of this view was the English critic and poet Matthew Arnold, whose work played a major role for the formation of ideas of the American cultivated classes (see Trilling, 1939; Shils, [1972d] 1972a: 244). And it was precisely this attitude to culture which Oakeshott made a target already in one of his early publications (Oakeshott, 2007b). Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, he suggested, call us back to the past by creating standards coined by ‘the classics’ of literature, the ‘great men’ of history, or ‘the masters’ of art. The opposite of culture in their view is anarchy. But there is another view which is based on ‘a personal criterion for culture’. It is characterized by ‘an improvident desire for freedom, integrity’, where the only thing which is essential is ‘an integrated self, whose purpose is … to live a life contemporary with itself’ (Oakeshott, 2007b: 59). The representatives of this approach to ‘culture’ include Epicurus and Montaigne, and the opposite of this notion of culture is not anarchy but despotism. With regard to mores, Oakeshott was fond of the life of adventure, spontaneity, and exploration of the self. He absorbed these neo-Romantic values in his young years, partly under the influence of the German youth movement in which he took part. But he preserved them even in his later years. As he noticed in the essay ‘On Being Conservative’, ‘it is not at all inconsistent to be conservative in respect of government and radical in respect of almost every other activity’ (Oakeshott, 1962a: 195). There was always something of a Romantic or bohemian to his character. One critic even called him ‘a lonely nihilist’ (Crick, 1963). For Oakeshott, social order existed precisely to live the life of adventure, and even deviancy. An Edwardian, rather than Victorian, he paid homage to the ideas of an Eton

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master, William Cory (Oakeshott, 1962e: 200n), who was once forced to resign on the suspicion of homosexuality. These were traits of which Shils was highly suspect. ‘Civil society’, he suggested, ‘requires compromise and reasonableness, prudent selfrestraint, and responsibility, and these are all deviations from the unqualifiedness and spontaneity which romanticism demands in all action. Romanticism is, as a result, at war with civil society’ ([1958b] 1972a: 57). But Oakeshott was equally suspect of bourgeois respectability. Consider his assessment of John Locke. Locke, he argued, ‘was the apostle of liberalism which is more conservative than conservatism itself … the liberalism which is sure of its limits, which has a horror of extremes, which lays its paralysing hand of respectability upon whatever is dangerous or revolutionary’. Oakeshott wished that liberalism could be rescued from its respectability, and ‘under the stimulus of the romantic movement … transformed into something less boring and upholstered’ (Oakeshott, 2007a: 85). Oakeshott advocated dispassionate and respectable government. But such government was required precisely to allow the subjects to perform various explorations in individuality. Oakeshott’s idea of individuality was akin to that of Romantic liberals, such as W. von Humboldt, Benjamin Constant, and J. S. Mill. Modern individuality required a certain touch of irresponsibility, so that it would not be swallowed by the bureaucratizing age. The touch of irresponsibility was important not only on the personal level but also for the society as a whole. Of course, Oakeshott recognized the value of civil commitment. For him, the paradigmatic exemplar of such commitment was Sidney Godolphin, who was killed during the English Civil War fighting for King Charles I out of the sense of civil loyalty (Oakeshott, 1962a: 192). Yet, for Oakeshott, active civil duty was relevant only in the moments of exception, when a heroic action to protect the civil order became necessary. But the routine of demobilized society requires distance from social activity, especially for artists and intellectuals. His was the ethics of irresponsibility for intellectuals, because it is precisely the deluded sense of responsibility which makes the intellectuals look at best ridiculous, and sometimes dangerous. It is in their seclusion that artists can be useful for society; their task is not to participate in politics but to work on a deeper level in order to make the society conscious of itself (Oakeshott, 1939). These traits of Oakeshott’s character and intellectual disposition lead, in my opinion, to a very different mood regarding the fate of liberal civilization. First, the outburst of expressive individuality did not frighten him. The alleged conservative, Oakeshott was much more at home with rebellious sentiments, than is usually believed. Unlike Shils, he did not



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think that radical life is incompatible with the liberal democratic order. The enemies of individuality have indeed exploited emancipationist agenda for their purposes. But this does not mean that they will have an upper hand. On the contrary, as Oakeshott once said, ‘at all important points the individual still appears as the substance and the “anti-individual” only as the shadow’ (1991: 383). And therefore radicals do not deserve concessions or too much respect. In his own version of the idea of a university Oakeshott offered a view which refused to accommodate the demands of either technocrats or ideologues. And he did so not because he wished to go against the times, but because he believed that the times were his. Shils’s disposition was characterized by over-conscientiousness and seriousness; Oakeshott’s by irony and even some touch of flamboyance. This may have made him bizarre and detached not only in the eyes of socialist critics such as Bernard Crick, but also in the eyes of fellow conservatives such as Irving Kristol, who was annoyed by Oakeshott’s socalled secularism (Kristol, 1995: 373). What both missed was that Oakeshott’s nonchalance was just a cheerful form of playing offence. It was the way of ‘making a friend’ of every cultural resource at the disposal of the Western civilization, without giving any ground to the friends of totalitarianism. And the celebration of individuality was perhaps the civilization’s most powerful resource. It is no wonder, therefore, that Oakeshott was one of the few antitotalitarians who was confident about the future demise of totalitarianism. It appears that he was also right to suspect that the most serious danger to academic freedom and the liberal democratic order from within comes not from the anarchy of radical emancipationism but from the despotism of radical anti-emancipationist moralism. Note 1 J. U. Nef, Memo to the Committee on Social Thought, 22 October 1949. Edward Shils Papers. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

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Edward Shils on pluralism and civility Richard Boyd

Introduction: the ordeals of civility In his influential work of social theory, The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias tells a fascinating story about how notions of civility and manners arose in the transition from medieval to early modern Europe (Elias, 2000). Conceived mainly in terms of conventions regarding etiquette, table manners, standards of personal grooming, and bodily hygiene, these incipient ideas of civility and civilization gave rise to broader sociological distinctions which functioned to separate social classes and differentiate elites from masses. In the intervening decades Elias’ critical vision of civility’s invidious and repressive qualities has been echoed by intellectual historians, sociologists, philosophers, and political theorists. Putting aside historical investigations of cases where manners, politeness, and standards of civility have served as instruments of exclusion or repression, as, for example, those documented by John F. Kasson (1990), these and related complaints about civility have become a mainstay of contemporary theorizing. Numerous social and political theorists have condemned the repressive, antidemocratic, homogenizing, and conservative aspects of civility – more generically – and the writings of Edward Shils in particular. John Keane, for example, faults the ‘conservative’ Shils for his ‘moralizing, potentially authoritarian tone’ that ‘barely conceals the fact that it is an elaborate tautology redolent of a premodern understanding of civil society as a lawful and ordered political community’ (1998: 115). In ‘The Passion for Civility’, a recent review essay in Political Studies Review, Derek Edyvane (2017) cites Shils as prominent among so-called ‘civilitarians’ for whom an embrace of civility constitutes a panacea for the ills of social conflict and the breakdown of modern society. Sometimes mentioning Shils by name, and other times without invoking his writings, John Murray Cuddihy (1987), Holloway Sparks (1997), James Schmidt (2000), Linda M. G. Zerilli (2014), and countless others have lamented civility’s repressive and exclusionary features.



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At the risk of oversimplifying, these and other influential criticisms of the concept – and the writings of Shils – cast civility as a set of social practices whose main purpose is to foster homogeneity, repress societal conflicts, facilitate social control, maintain hierarchies, and exclude heterogeneous populations. The concept of civility is condemned as inherently conservative, and Shils is portrayed as a figure hostile to pluralism, democratic equality, and progressive social change. In the following account I seek to challenge this ‘conservative’ rendition of Shils’ social and political theory. I argue that far from repressive, elitist, or nostalgic, Shils’ endorsement of civility is intended to deal precisely with the realities of a modern liberal democratic society where individuals are supposed to subscribe to a plurality of different views of the good and interact with their fellow citizens on terms of equality in the everyday life of a democracy. Upon closer examination, Shils’ conception of civility reveals itself to be egalitarian, pluralistic, and within limits, modestly progressive. Shils’ definition of civility Commentators have lamented the difficulty of pinning down a precise definition of ‘civility’ (Boyd, 2006). The problem is twofold: ambiguity inheres both in the nature of the sociological phenomenon as well as in its usage by any particular social theorist. Unsurprisingly, Shils’ concept of civility is no exception. As with other prominent theorists of civility, Shils’ understanding of the term veers between sociological, moral, and political connotations. Civility represents at different moments a moral virtue, a social habitus, a characterological disposition, and maybe most puzzlingly, a cognitive orientation of the human mind. Like so many categories in classical sociological theory, the term ‘civil’ is commonly understood as one half of an antinomy, that is, a term whose meaning can only be understood in juxtaposition to another sociological concept. Familiar examples of such ideal-typical pairings include dichotomies of ‘status’ and ‘contract’, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, ‘mechanical’ versus ‘organic’ solidarity, and so forth (Shils, 1991a). In the case of civility, however, the other referent varies depending on time period and context. In the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and other contractarians distinguished between ‘civil society’ and a ‘state of nature’; in the eighteenth century Adam Smith, David Hume, and Adam Ferguson regarded ‘civil society’ as the historico-anthropological alternative to ‘rudeness’ or ‘barbarism’; and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, and neo-Tocquevilleans such as Robert Putnam differentiated in structural terms between our compulsory juridical membership in the modern ‘state’, on the one hand, and various

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informal, voluntary, or private matters of ‘bourgeois’ or ‘civil society’, on the other (Keane, 1988; Ehrenberg, 1999; Berry, 2003; Boyd, 2004, 2013). In all of these cases, ‘civil society’ – that is to say, a society characterized by the moral quality of ‘civility’ – appears over and against some other conceptual term or sociological condition. For his part, Shils posits ‘civility’ in contradistinction to ‘ideology’, as for example in his classic essay ‘Ideology and Civility’ (Shils, [1997e] 1997a). Ideology stands for a certain style of politics, one which is characterized by fanaticism, extra-constitutional violence, a ‘dualistic’ Manicheanism, and a monistic intolerance for the moral ambiguities and complications that characterize the social condition (Shils, [1997e] 1997a: 25–8). Ideology takes the form of various political ‘isms’: Marxism, nationalism, Fascism, Romanticism, populism, millenarianism, and other revolutionary political doctrines that seek to reshape the world. Ideological politics cuts across the political spectrum from Left to Right (Shils, 1954a). What all these manifestations share in common is monism: ideological politics is animated by ‘the assumption that politics should be conducted from the standpoint of a coherent, comprehensive set of beliefs which must override every other consideration’. In practice this mindset not only dominates politics; it also ‘radiate[s] into every sphere of life’, superseding alternative sources of religious, aesthetic, scientific, or familial authority (Shils, [1997e] 1997a: 26). If ideology and ideological politics are characterized by a predilection for violence, disrespect of traditions, and a moral uniformity that regards ambiguity with suspicion, then civility represents the opposite tendency: namely, a style of conduct that treats one’s political adversaries, unfamiliar customs and institutions, and moral diversity with respect. This is not respect in the sense of social deference, although as we will see, Shils does think that social deference to others in everyday life is one important attribute of civility (Shils, [1997d] 1997a: 338). Rather, the ethos of civility acknowledges a plurality of standards of judgement that may be discrepant to any single moral virtue or political value. Perhaps the chief component of a civil society is one in which there is a ‘complex of autonomous institutions – economic, religious, intellectual, and political – distinguishable from the family, the clan, the locality and the state’ (Shils, [1997d] 1997a: 321). One of the most vexing aspects of civility is its association with matters of politeness – etiquette, courtesy, ‘good manners’, and other social conventions (Shils, [1997d] 1997a: 336–40; [1997f] 1997a: 79). And Shils concurs as to the importance of the latter. ‘Good manners’, he notes, are a common feature, albeit not universally achieved, ‘of the direct contacts of individuals in each other’s presence or at a distance’ (Shils, [1997f]



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1997a: 79). Conversely, conduct that is degrading, disrespectful, or threatening towards fellow citizens is patently uncivil. Treating someone with disrespect, even if it is only a matter of everyday rudeness, bespeaks a fundamental moral disregard for their person and dignity. And yet notwithstanding the formal aspects of manners in everyday life that seem to be inextricably enmeshed with the concept of civility, Shils is adamant that civility cannot be reduced to manners: ‘Civility has meant more than good manners, and it is an impoverishment of our vocabulary as well as a sign of the impoverishment of our thought on political matters that this word has been allowed to dwindle to the point where it has come to refer [only] to good manners in face-to-face relationships’ (Shils, [1997e] 1997a: 49n24). Once again, and to be clear, Shils does not deny the vital role manners play in signifying respect for fellow citizens as our moral equals. He identifies ‘intimations of consideration for the sensibilities of other persons and particularly for their desire to be esteemed’ in everyday formalities such as ‘courtesy, well-spokenness, moderation, respect for others, self-restraint, gentlemanliness, urbanity, refinement, good manners, [or] politeness’. Treating others with courtesy in everyday life is one important way that we signify our respect for them as inhabiting the same moral plane. Conversely, disrespect for another person, or treating them as ‘inferior in dignity’, would be ‘antithetical to civility’. ‘Civility’, Shils summarizes, ‘is basically respect for the dignity or desire for dignity of other persons’ (Shils, [1997d] 1997a: 337–8). All that being said, civility understood as ‘good manners’ must be distinguished from what Shils deems to be the primary meaning of civility: namely, public conduct oriented towards the common good, or in his terms ‘public civility’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 80–1). Although ‘civility in private life and civility in the face-to-face relations of participants in public life are not entirely different from each other’, they have different ends or purposes (Shils, 1997f: 79–81). On the one hand, courtesy and good manners serve to assuage conflicts and soften the hard edges of an otherwise competitive society (Shils, [1997d] 1997a: 339). Because modern society is largely a society of strangers, not to mention the fact that ‘good nature’ and ‘temperamental amiability’ can only go so far, good manners lubricate the frictions of a pluralistic society (Shils, [1997d] 1997a: 339; [1997f] 1997a: 79). On the other hand, and more affirmatively, the virtue of civility as public-spiritedness disposes individuals to participate in common political life. As a political virtue, civility represents ‘the conduct of a person whose individual self-consciousness ha[s] been partially superseded by his collective self-consciousness’ (Shils, [1997d] 1997a: 335). Civility as public-spiritedness is all the more essential given that the normal operation of liberal democratic institutions cannot be supposed to

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rest on underlying agreement about anything much in the way of substantive values. Not only do liberalism and representative democracy accept the existence of social conflicts; they also serve to elevate, if not exacerbate, adversarial conflicts (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 75–9). Beyond a remedial sense of dampening conflicts, however, civility as public spirit also helps to integrate society. Civility ‘postulates that antagonists are also members of the same society’ and that ‘they participate in the same collective self-consciousness’ (Shils, [1997d] 1997a: 340). Contrary to the Schmittean formulation that defines political life in terms of a totalizing struggle between ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, civility ‘places a limit on the irreconcilability with which parochial ends are pursued’, thereby emphasizing the individual’s ‘attachment to the whole’ (Shils, [1997d] 1997a: 341). It operates as a ‘restraining power in the public sphere’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 97). Thus far we have seen the importance of civility understood in terms of sociological conventions such as good manners, politeness, or courtesy to others in everyday life. We have also seen how Shils distinguishes this from the virtue of public-spiritedness. And yet there is another, deeper philosophical conception of civility at work in his writings. Rather than mere social habitus, or even a Montesquieuean virtue, civility represents a fundamental orientation of the human mind. At various moment Shils refers to civility as a ‘belief’, ‘attitude’, ‘outlook’, ‘sense of affinity’, ‘consciousness’, ‘ethos’, ‘disposition’, or ‘mode of political action’, ‘a pattern and standard of judgment’ that orients one towards the common political good (Shils, [1980] 1997a: 4, 15; [1997d] 1997a: 320, 340; [1997e] 1997a: 61; [1997f] 1997a: 70). As an orientation of the human mind, civility ‘entails a cognitive account of the structure or pattern of the whole society and a normative prescription to act for its benefit’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 78). Alongside the religious, aesthetic, personal, or scientific orientations, each of whose categorially distinctive patterns or modalities gives rise to internal standards of judgement and dictates normative commitments, civility represents a public or political orientation (Weber, 1946; Oakeshott, 1978; Grosby, 2002). To behave ‘civilly’ is to defer one’s particular interests ‘for the good of the whole’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 78). The development of civil society marks the ascendancy of civil relationships – that is to say, relationships among fellow-citizens understood as largely anonymous co-equals – at the partial expense of what Shils elsewhere called ‘personal’, ‘primordial’, or ‘sacred’ ties (Shils, [1957] 1975a). The latter orientations of the human mind tend to preponderate in societies that have not yet attained the character of a civil society. Contrary to so-called ‘primordial’ collectivities, civil society is constituted by reference to the ‘civil quality of its participants, i.e., their being members of a society



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under a common authority, common laws, and living in a common, more or less bounded territory’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 71; cf. Geertz, 1963). Civility dictates that members of a civil society conceive of themselves, and treat one another, as fellow citizens rather than as kinsmen, co-religionists, or neighbours (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 71–2). Civil society need not preclude the persistence of primordial bonds, but the civil orientation does insist that obligations of citizenship take precedence over such primordial ties. ‘The civil person’, Shils notes, ‘is one who thinks primarily of the civil society as the object of his obligations, not the members of his family, or his village, or his party or of his ethnic group or his social class, or his occupation’ ([1997f] 1997a: 72). Civility as the nostalgic revival of virtue Having surveyed civility’s various connotations in Shils’ writings, I want to turn in the remainder of this chapter to consider how his conception is well positioned against common objections by critics. This is not to say that civility’s detractors do not have valid objections. It is only to suggest that Shils’ own theory of civility avoids some of the most egregious problems identified by latter-day critics. One common lament is that civility’s proponents are nostalgic conservatives committed to reviving virtue – whether classical Greek, Christian, conservative, or otherwise. So-called ‘civilitarians’ like Shils want a society where everyone is united around a common set of traditional virtues. There are two closely related aspects of this indictment. First, there is the notion that invocations of civility are nostalgic, if not reactionary, with civility representing, like chivalry, a long-lost or antiquarian social value that needs to be rehabilitated. Second, there is the idea that civility is intended to serve as a proxy for virtue, that is, to offer substantive moral standards shared by everyone in society. With respect to the historical evolution of civility, it is crucial to emphasize that for Shils at least, civility is not backward-looking. It is a characteristically modern virtue that emerges coterminously with what we think of as contemporary liberal democratic society. Civility was hardly conspicuous in the classical or aristocratic ages because aristocracy was predicated on the virtues of the warrior – martial courage, honour, chivalry, etc. (Shils, [1997e] 1997a: 50). By way of contrast, as the virtue of the modern citizen, civility emerges only in the democratic age – both as a reflection of the characteristics most essential to the modern democratic citizen as well as an acknowledgement of the special requirements of an adversarial political system where order can no longer be maintained by unitary consensus or shared values.

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While acknowledging ideological tendencies that strain the traditions of civility, Shils is no Pollyanna: ‘I do not wish to portray the Western societies of the past third of a century as having fallen from grace into perdition’ (Shils, [1980] 1997a: 12). There is no ‘golden age’ of civility to which Shils’ work refers our attention. And while he is mindful – and critical – of certain progressive, romantic, or ideological movements that would deny the authority and legitimacy which are prerequisites for societal consensus, he is explicit that even in the face of great pressures brought about by ideological politics, society is in no immediate danger of collapsing into chaos, ‘mass society’, or a war of all against all (Shils, [1980] 1997a: 12–13; [1997d] 1997a: 341–54; 1962a). Indeed, civility seems in many ways to be at its apogee in contemporary liberal democratic societies because of the unprecedented degree to which these societies have succeeded in incorporating historically marginalized groups into the collective self-consciousness. Finally, it is important to note that civility for Shils is less a substantive than a procedural virtue. In this respect it is akin to the moral quality of civility that Michael Oakeshott described as ‘adverbial’, that is, as qualifying the manner or spirit in which one pursues one’s chosen ends, rather than specifying any particular purposes as definitive of membership in the modern state (Oakeshott, 1975). As Shils makes clear, civility is not just a normative idea that one’s individual interests ought to be subordinated to the public good, albeit to a limited degree and only some of the time. It is also a cognitive acknowledgement of the existence of a collectivity of which one imagines one’s self to be an equal and participating member. Civility as repressive Civility is widely denounced as an alibi for repressive social control – one that ends up being more powerful than the formal apparatus of the state because of its insidious reach into every facet of life. Coercion from the state is easy to identify; civility is subtly woven into the social tableau. In remarks that seem to confirm civility’s repressive qualities, Shils stresses how the virtue of civility functions to provide order, alleviate conflict, and bolster the formal workings of representative institutions. Civility is at least potentially at odds with many ‘emancipationist’ or ‘progressive’ strands of political thinking that Shils characterizes as ‘ideological’. Short of the uncivil behaviour he associates with ideological extremism, however, there is an undeniable place for civility in managing day-to-day frustrations. At the most mundane level, good manners serve to minimize personal annoyance or abrasiveness. ‘Good manners are like uniforms and discipline which hide slovenliness, poor taste, and unpleasing eccentricity’;



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they do in some sense ‘repress’ in the sense of discouraging anti-social, discordant, and extra-constitutional behaviours (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 79). Nonetheless, civility’s capacity to repress social conflicts is highly constrained. It would be a mistake to conclude that because some measure of civility is necessary to preserve order that the impetus of civility is to stifle all differences or dissensual elements in society. Note the following striking disclaimer: ‘An entirely civil society is difficult to imagine but if one does succeed in forming some notion of what it would be like, it appears to be undesirable’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 97)! As he goes on to clarify: A society in which no one thought of anything but the common good might be extremely boring, spiritually impoverished, and intellectually infertile. Disagreement, individual self-seeking initiatives, saying things which might give offense, breaking away from the cover of the collective self-consciousness, are part of the spice of life. But there can be too much of a good thing. That is where civility has its proper place as a restraining power in the public sphere. (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 97)

Because liberal democracy ‘open[s] the political field’ to a multiplicity of otherwise latent conflicts, not to mention the demands of a plurality of actors and interests heretofore marginalized or excluded, it is especially in need of civility. The proper task of civility in a pluralistic liberal democratic society is neither to stifle these demands nor to legitimate some claims at the expense of others. Rather civility is ‘an attitude and a mode of action which attempts to strike a balance between conflicting demands and conflicting interests’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 76). Its function is moderation. This is not to say that civility has never been invoked historically as a way of silencing dissent or privileging certain interests at the expense of others deemed uncivil. Civility’s repressive and exclusionary potentialities are undeniable. It is only to say that Shils seems well aware of them, and rejects them as undesirable. ‘A society differentiated with respect to occupation, region, religion, ethnic origins, status, etc., is bound to experience conflicts among its different sectors’, Shils realistically acknowledges. There is no expectation that ‘conflicts of particular, divergent interests and of particular, divergent ideals’ could ever be avoided, or that civility represents an apotropaic for warding off such conflicts (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 74). Rather, Shils’ endorsement underscores the decisive role that civility plays – against the backdrop of an abundant and agonistic pluralism – in preventing these conflicts from accelerating into a Schmittean landscape of struggle and physical violence. Rather than eliminating or repressing pluralism and conflict, ‘civility diminishes the intensity of these conflicts’ (Shils, [1997d] 1997a: 343).

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One legitimate worry is that by extolling civility and civil politics – especially in preference to ideology – one ends up fetishizing civility. Civility itself becomes the cardinal virtue of social and political life, which is to say that it becomes ideological, the very antithesis of its purported goals. Shils distances his version of civility from any such ideological aspirations. As he cautions, ‘A complete disavowal of every line of affinity between civility and ideology will not only be false in fact but would turn civility into an ideology.’ Improperly applied, the virtue of civility becomes nothing more than an instrument of ‘pure politics’ designed to facilitate ‘the acquisition of power and retention of power and the maintenance of public order’ (Shils, [1997e] 1997a: 59). Importantly, civil politics must be receptive to the kinds of ‘substantive values’ often advocated by ideological politics – for example, equality, social justice, progressive reform, social mobility, greater inclusion, or love of country. Civility separates itself from ideological politics not by disavowing these worthy ends, but in terms of the means it deems appropriate in their pursuit, not to mention by its recognition that those estimable goals must be balanced against other equally important and sometimes incommensurable values (Shils, [1997e] 1997a: 58–9). With respect to civility’s allegedly ‘conservative’ function in maintaining power and preserving public order, the most significant vector for the deployment of civility should be noted. The normative thrust of civility runs not from society’s top to bottom, but just as importantly from bottom to top. Incivility may be a problem of what he calls the ‘periphery’, that is, of marginalized populations only loosely incorporated into the collective self-consciousness of society, but it occurs as frequently – and with more disturbing consequences – at a society’s ‘centre’. Some incivility is not only expected from society’s periphery, but it is in many ways welcome. Protests, organized interest groups, populism, general strikes, and demonstrations – within the broad limits of lawabidingness and an abiding respect for one’s opponents as fellow citizens – foreground grievances and catalyse social reform. Instances of incivility may ultimately result in a greater sense of the collective self-consciousness on the part of previously marginalized groups. Their gradual incorporation into a society’s collective self-consciousness is one of the hallmarks of modern liberal democratic society, and as Shils remarks, it is this process of integrating excluded groups into the collective self-consciousness that ‘has been the product of and the conditions for the growth of civility’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 102) By way of contrast, incivility’s most caustic effects are found at the centre – when, for example, politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and



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others conspicuously disavow the practice of civility. Large public audiences encourage politicians to engage in demagogy and the demonization of their enemies through uncivil speech. Mass media dramatize and disseminate the bad behaviour of politicians, creating ‘an uncivil portrayal of the public sphere’. Maybe most decisively, intellectuals personify incivility. Here and elsewhere it is the intellectuals or elites, rather than the masses, who come in for Shils’ strongest condemnation (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 82–3). Thankfully, the worst effects of conspicuous incivility by politicians, intellectuals, and others at society’s centre are met by a sense of ‘indifference, distraction, scepticism, and patriotism’ on the part of the working and middle classes, who do not allow politics to intrude into their daily concerns (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 82). Civility and pluralism Civility is frequently blamed for imposing a stultifying veneer of social conformity on otherwise heterogeneous populations. And insofar as civility is associated with the rise of the modern nation-state, there is some truth to this characterization (Shils, [1995b] 1997a). At the same time, however, Shils is clear that one of the reasons we so badly need a virtue like civility is because of the extent to which complex modern societies throw together individuals with different values and purposes. Modern society abounds with a plurality of different groups whose comprehensive views of the good are not only different from one another, but are mutually incommensurable. One of the sociological puzzles explored by the likes of Durkheim, Simmel, and Shils is how complex, pluralistic modern societies can exist at all – let alone maintain such high degrees of social cohesion – in the absence of shared purposes and in the face of inveterate conflicts (Durkheim, 1984; Simmel, 1971). The kind of pluralism envisioned here is twofold. Civility is uniquely congenial to a society characterized by high degrees of what we might call social or cultural pluralism. Within broad limits, citizens are not expected to share deeper religious, moral, or cultural values; these are private matters about which citizens are free to agree or disagree. Yet Shils also envisions a more fundamental kind of pluralism – what we might call moral or philosophical pluralism – whereby conflicts exist not just among divergent religious or cultural traditions, but in the very nature of moral systems themselves. One of his clearest statements of this moral pluralism is the following: ‘Above all, civil politics requires an understanding of the complexity of virtue, that no virtue stands alone, that every virtuous act costs something

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in terms of other virtuous acts, that virtues are intertwined with evils, and that no theoretical system of a hierarchy of virtues is ever realizable in practice’ (Shils, [1997e] 1997a: 52). It is ideology – not civility – that is responsible for attempts to remake the world in the image of a single monistic virtue, moral hierarchy, overarching purpose, or common destiny. Philosophical pluralism in the sense in which Shils imagines it here is predicated on the existence of different moral virtues which are themselves incommensurable, to some degree non-compossible, and thus liable to agonistic trade-offs. In addition to pluralism as cultural difference and philosophical pluralism, there is one other model that Shils invokes by way of emphasizing the decisive importance of civility: namely, the pluralistic vision of categorially distinct ‘spheres’ or domains of social life whose independence from one another is a condition both for civility and freedom. As Shils notes, one of the dangers of ideology in particular – and perhaps the thing that disposes ideological politics of various stripes toward totalitarianism – is the tendency for acrimonious political struggles over ultimate ends to infiltrate other co-equal spheres of human existence. The spirit of civility is decisive in preventing this spillover of political contestation into other organs of civil society. Shils extols the ‘deep but not very subtle civility of ordinary people in most liberal democratic societies’ who resist ‘allowing politics to become the be-all and end-all of their lives’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 95). Civility’s value in resisting the Siren song of ideology derives from the fact that it ‘inhibits the extension of politics and the politicization of other spheres, e.g., the economic, the ecclesiastical, the academic, and the domestic’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 95). Civility and democracy Civility is often cast as a ‘conservative’ or ‘exclusionary’ virtue, that is to say associated with preserving inequality and hierarchies. Elias’ (2000) upper classes use civility as a way of differentiating themselves from the masses. Kasson’s (1990) portrayal of the invention of manners in nineteenth-century America shows how etiquette can establish privilege and relegate those deemed to be ‘rude’ or ‘uncivil’ to an inferior social status. Precisely because of its association with the purely formal aspects of manners, politeness, and etiquette, the virtue of civility has acquired the reputation of being elitist or anti-democratic. This is starkly at odds with Shils’ vision of civility, however, where it appears as a virtue associated with democratic equality and the habits of ordinary democratic citizens. As we have seen, Shils connects the emergence of civility with the gradual replacement of those primordial, lineal,



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sacred, and local ties that formed the framework for pre-modern society. As these sorts of primordial relationships are attenuated by the progressive consolidation of first liberal, then recognizably democratic, institutions, social cohesion comes to be provided by the so-called ‘collective selfconsciousness’, which facilitates the ‘inclusion of unknown and unseen persons’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 101). Granting the necessarily uneven diffusion of a society’s collective self-consciousness, and the fact that not every individual or group will participate in it to the same degree, civility’s proliferation gives rise to a sense of membership that is widely ‘shared or participated in by a large part of the population’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 101). Broad engagement with the collective self-consciousness not only fosters societal cohesion – preventing modern society from devolving into a veritable state of nature – but is also morally significant insofar as it ‘assigns a minimum of dignity to the various sectors of the population which it comprehends’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 102). This is not to say that civility demands an absolute equality among persons. ‘Beyond that minimum of moral dignity’, Shils concedes, ‘there might be acknowledged differences in value’ or status. Nonetheless, ‘what is important is the inclusiveness of the referent in the collective consciousness’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 102). Civility is predicated on the widespread – if not universal – consciousness on the part of both elites at the ‘centre’ of society as well as various individuals or groups located at the periphery that they are all part of some common project. This is in marked contrast to pre-modern societies where elites at the centre of a given society hardly acknowledged the existence of peripheries – let alone their intrinsic moral dignity – ‘except to keep them quiet, obedient, and productive’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 102). To be sure, on a day-to-day basis the sense of civility is often de minimis. ‘Not everyone in a civil society needs to be completely civil in his relations with the rest of society or to a particular group other than his own, and at all times’, Shils notes: ‘Even if it were desirable, it is neither necessary nor possible’ for everyone to be civil to his fellow citizens at all times. Instead of being a thick or perfectionist conception, Shils’ expectations for civility are modest. And rather than civility being something that elites impose on the masses, it is telling that the burdens of civility fall most heavily on those who inhabit what Shils calls the ‘centre’ of society. ‘A civil society is imperilled’, he observes, ‘if there is a low degree of civility within and between its centres’. Conspicuous incivility on the part of politicians, public figures, intellectuals, academics, and others who constitute the ‘centre’ is dangerous insofar as ‘their conflicts are broadcast in amplified form through society and their example encourages uncivil attitudes in other parts of society’. ‘Internal incivility’ on the part of the political classes is demoralizing and threatens to erode extant traditions of civility

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(Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 86). Especially for prominent public officials, civility (or incivility) has a ‘radiative or reinforcing effect’ on others (Shils, [1997d] 1997a: 348). Why is the public degradation of civility a problem, we may wonder? Or is it a problem at all, given the resilience Shils attributes to the collective self-consciousness in modern liberal democratic societies? His ultimate position seems to be equivocal: neither a vantage of studied indifference to the fate of civility, nor one of strident advocacy for its contemporary resuscitation. Civility is at best ‘only an ingredient of a civil society’, one variable among many. This is because civility is by and large a tradition: ‘we can only draw on what is already there’. Civility cannot be created ex nihilo (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 86). Conclusion: Shils as ‘civilitarian’? In view of the preceding analysis, a few concluding lessons emerge about Shils’ place amid the resurgence of contemporary calls for civility. First, as should be clear by now, Shils’ variation of civility embraces more than just the manners, courtesy, or politeness in everyday affairs upon which civility’s contemporary defenders and critics alike have disproportionately focused. For Shils, civility is also and more importantly an orientation of mind or pattern of judgement, one that disposes individuals towards public duties and an acknowledgement of the collective self-consciousness of which they are a part. Second, far from an instrument deployed by elites to exclude, control, or repress the uncivil masses, Shilsian civility is a virtue that demands more from politicians, intellectuals, and others at the centre than it does from the masses or heretofore marginalized groups whose incivility it fully accepts. ‘Not everyone in a civil society needs to be completely civil in his relations with the rest of society or to a particular group other than his own, and at all times’, he modestly concedes (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 86). His various essays on civility are disproportionately focused on outlining an ethics of responsibility for those in positions of public authority. Finally, one must stress Shils’ modest expectations about the degree to which civility can be deliberately fostered. Civility is part of a process of historical development: the fruition of the acknowledgment of the claims and aspirations of excluded populations for inclusion and equal dignity. Civility may wax or wane, within individual persons and throughout society as a whole. And while it ought to be encouraged wherever possible by various institutions or ‘sub-centres’ in both the centre and periphery, it is not the kind of virtue that can be made up from whole cloth. ‘How much civility does a liberal democratic society need to be a civil society?’



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remains an open question (Shils, [1997d] 1997a: 348). But what is clear is that civility cannot be conjured up by means of social engineering, moral suasion, or hortatory treatises. As Shils notes of the sobering prospects of civility: ‘It is not a matter of creating it ab novo; it is rather a matter of nurturing already existing dispositions and not cultivating the weeds of conflict which can suffocate it’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 86).

8

Nations, nationality, and civil society in the work of Edward Shils Peter Mentzel

Without territory and without tradition there can be no nation; without a nation there can be no civil society. Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 223

This chapter will explore Edward Shils’ original and highly nuanced treatment of the concepts of ‘nationality’, ‘nationalism’, and ‘civil society’. In Shils’ framework, these concepts are closely interrelated, and the ways in which they interact are important for understanding Shils’ broader sociological project. As Athena Leoussi has perceptively pointed out: ‘In Shils’ writings on the nation and nationalism we find some of the most central themes of his whole oeuvre: tradition, civility, centre-periphery, charisma, liberal-democracy’ (Leoussi, 2013: 1960). In the process of elaborating Shils’ theoretical associations of nationality, nationalism, and civil society, I will try to understand what sociological mechanisms Shils believed undergirded these relationships and how they might also be at work in Shils’ broader, classical liberal, vision of society. Similarly, the chapter will situate Shils’ theories of nations and nationalism within the broader scholarly debate on these subjects. In the process, this chapter will examine Shils’ ideas concerning the relative antiquity of nations and the historical specifics about the origins of nationalism. Finally, the chapter will try to fit Shils’ work on nations and nationalism into the ongoing scholarly debate surrounding the binary of ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism. ‘Civility’ and ‘civil society’ As other contributors to this volume explain in more detail, one of Shils’ great contributions to sociology was surely his work on the concepts of ‘civility’ and ‘civil society’. Historically, one of the most influential treatments of the idea of civil society was by Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America, especially in Part III, chapter 5, ‘Of the Use that



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Americans make of Association in Civil Life’. Here, Tocqueville draws a clear distinction between ‘political associations’ and ‘associations that are formed in civil life and whose aim has nothing political about it’ (Tocqueville, [1835] 2010: 896). Tocqueville marvels not only at the ‘commercial and industrial associations’ of the Americans, but perhaps even more so at the ‘thousands of other kinds’. While these organizations are explicitly not political, Tocqueville argues that they have a crucial role in acting as a check on the power of the state. It is this Tocquevillian notion of civil society that has come to prevail as the general understanding of the term.1 While Shils’ use of the terms ‘civility’ and ‘civil society’ clearly partake of the older, Tocquevillian, description of ‘civil life’, it is considerably more complex and expansive. Like much of his other work, Shils’ writings on these subjects were influenced by Max Weber. In this context, Shils seemed intrigued by two of Weber’s concepts, namely, his notion of Verantwortungsethik, an ‘ethic of responsibility’, and his ideas concerning Vereinswessen (translated as ‘associational life’) and the related category of Sektengesellschaft (translated as ‘sect-society’, or ‘sectarian society’). Importantly, Weber himself completely avoided the term ‘civil society’ (Bürgerlichegesellschaft), preferring Bürgertum, translated, somewhat confusingly perhaps, as ‘bourgeois society’ (although another translation is simply ‘middle class’). Weber may have wished to avoid the term Bürgerlichegesellschaft because its meaning had been saturated with Hegelian and Marxist understandings, neither of which fit with Weber’s own project. Weber’s civil society was a much more robust, expansive concept than that described by either Hegel, Marx, or Engels, or indeed Tocqueville. Especially important for Shils’ subsequent work was the explicitly political nature of Weber’s concept of civil society. His writing on an ethics (or politics) of responsibility appears, in fact, in his 1919 lecture ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (Weber, [1919] 2004: 83). Shils developed this concept still further. While in Weber’s terms this kind of responsibility seemed to be largely attached to a political actor (i.e. someone who makes politics his ‘vocation’), in Shils’ hands it balloons to encompass all of society. Shils’ description of Weber’s ethics of responsibility captures, I think, the tension and challenge of Weber’s concept, while at the same time expanding on its usefulness: ‘By the “ethics”… of “responsibility”, Max Weber meant choices made by weighing the costs and benefit of pursuing a variety of alternatives, each of them entailing values incommensurable with … each other.’ Shils goes on to explain that, according to Weber, the political leader acting in accordance with an ethic of responsibility had to have the courage to make decisions ‘in the national interest, not just the interest of any particular sector of German society’. Shils goes on to clarify that he ‘would substitute

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the term “the interests of the whole society” because [he] would like to give more prominence to the practice of the politics of responsibility on behalf of the entire society in its internal affairs as well as in its position in the world’ (Shils, [1997f] 1997a: 66). While Shils was thus clearly impressed by Weber’s concept of an ethic of responsibility, the impact of Weber’s other reflections on civil society is less obvious, though clearly present. Weber argued that the ‘associational life’ that characterizes civil society itself was rooted in the concept of the sect, emerging out of the Protestant Reformation. ‘Thus [Weber] claims … that the “archetype of voluntary association is the [Protestant] sect”. In other words, modern civil society was born in the aftermath of the Reformation and the politico-social upheaval it brought about in social organization’ (Kim, 2002: 192). The link between sects and civil society relies heavily on the differences between Weber’s ideal types of the Sect and the Church. While the latter, in his formulation, is bureaucratic and associated with ascriptive birth communities, the former is voluntaristic and based on purposeful behaviour. ‘Weber believes that the sect principles of rigorous selection of members and strict supervision of daily activities coupled with a constant threat of expulsion have to be retained even by modern secular voluntary associations’ (Kim, 2002: 194). The interaction, even competition, of voluntary associations in modern society, Weber argued, could help slow, though not reverse, the inexorable growth of the ‘iron cage’ of the modern bureaucratic state. To put it another way, ‘Weber imagined [civil society as] a social mechanism based on ethical conformism which nonetheless worked toward the cultivation of non-conformist individualism’ (Kim, 2002: 196). The parallels between Weber’s reflections on civil society and Shils’ are very strong. For Shils, civil society is closely tied to his concept of ‘civility’, which he describes as ‘the virtue of the citizen, of the man who shares responsibility in his own self-government, either as a governor or as one of the governed’ (Shils, [1997e] 1997a: 49). ‘Civility’ is thus a type of consciousness, or a way of looking at the world that ultimately rests on the idea of personal responsibility for the smooth functioning of human society. In this sense, it is the foundation both for what is usually thought of as ‘civil society’ as well as for a liberal democratic state and free economic system. To put it another way, Shils suggested that civil society implies membership in a society of self-governing individuals, which itself is the basis of a free political order. This recalls the importance Weber put on the disciplinary aspects of civil society growing out of the Sektengesellschaft. Shils admits that ‘There is as much “conformism” in “civility” as there is in the ethics of responsibility’ (Shils, 1997a: 218). Shils’ conception of civil society is thus considerably more expansive and robust than



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most current uses of the term would suggest. As he explained, ‘A civil society is in my terms a society in which civility enfolds both “civil society” and the state’ (Shils, [1997e] 1997a: 73). Also, ‘civil society is the governor which regulates both the economy and the government although both are, to some degree, autonomous’ (Shils [1997e] 1997a: 74). It is important to emphasize here that Shils synthesizes a much broader and at the same time more basic definition of civil society than is commonly used. Recall that Shils’ civil society is the ‘governor’ of both the economy and the government, and thus plays a watchdog role similar in some ways to what Tocqueville seems to have had in mind. At the same time, Shils says that it ‘enfolds’ much (most?) of the space of human activity. For Shils, civil society is constituted by a collective self-consciousness in which the important referent is the civil quality of its participants, i.e., their being members of a society under … common laws and living in a common, more or less bounded territory. (Shils, [1997e] 1997a: 71)

Civil society, nations, and nationality As noted earlier, according to Shils, the ‘glue’ holding the participants in civil society together is what he calls ‘nationality’. He says, ‘nationality is a necessary ingredient, perhaps even precondition, for civil society. It is the collective self-consciousness which sustains the civil society’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 221). ‘Civil society is guided and oriented by nationhood. Civil society is one of the institutional manifestations of the nation’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 214). Shils had very particular, even idiosyncratic, definitions of nation and nationality. According to Shils, ‘Nationality is a state of collective self-consciousness. It is not a collectivity—although it is often used interchangeably with nation, which is a collectivity … a nation is constituted by its collective self-consciousness, the referents of which are birth in a specifically bounded territory, residence in that bounded territory or descent from persons resident in that bounded territory’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 189). Thus, we might recast the relationship between nationality and nation (in Shilsian terms) as one between the collective social body (the nation) and the contents of its collective self-consciousness (nationality). We should, therefore, be able to use national self-consciousness as a synonym of nationality, which Shils in fact seems occasionally to do.2 Shils draws a distinction between nationality and ‘national identity’. ‘Nationhood and nationality do … sometimes reappear as “national identity” or “national character” but these terms mean something different. Sometimes they refer to the stable similarities of members of a nation as perceived by external observers. The other meaning which sometimes is

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stressed is the self-imagined self-designation of individuals who belong to a particular national or ethnic group; this is closer to what I have in mind when I speak of national collective self-consciousness’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 197). I think that what Shils is trying to work out here is some sort of terminology that reflects the difference between a self-ascriptive national selfconsciousness (which he calls nationality) and an ascription by others of an individual’s membership in a nation (which he seems to call ‘national identity’ or ‘national character’). At this point, it might be worthwhile to try to construct some sort of Shilsian definition of nationality and nation. Importantly, while Shils outlines in considerable detail (and force) the centrality of nationality to civil society, he tells us more about what nationality and nations are rather than what they are not. One of the most important aspects of his understanding of nation is the absence of any ethnic or biological component in its definition. In fact, Shils explicitly rejects any such association. ‘Nativity and location are more important in nationhood than ties of blood among contemporaries and recent ancestors … . In the inheritance of nationality what is transmitted is “territoriality,” and not “blood,” nor any physical qualities’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 198–9). The nation, therefore, does not correspond exactly with Tönnies’ category of Gemeinschaft (a fact noted by Shils himself), though it seems to partake of it. By extension, the hybridity of Shils’ concept of nation (and thus, nationality) applies also to civil society, which contains elements of both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, a point to which we will return later. One of the weaknesses of Shils’ work on this subject, it seems to me, is the strange emptiness of the box labelled ‘nationality’. As noted above, he carefully and emphatically divorces the concept from anything having to do with biology, ‘blood’, or even ethnicity (a term with which he barely engages). All of the heavy lifting in his account is done by ‘territory and nativity’. But surely this amounts to an extremely thin version of ‘nationality’? I do not think, however, that Shils intends to offer us such thin nationalist gruel, for his concept of nationality has to perform extremely difficult and demanding work in the maintenance of civil society, and thicker, more nutritious sustenance is clearly called for. The key here is to be found in unpacking the concept of ‘territoriality’, what Shils referred to above as the ‘inheritance of nationality’. Territoriality is an expression of an ‘historically persistent primordial pattern of attachment to relatively extensive environments, for example, to the territory of the national state’ (Grosby, 1995: 144). Thus, territoriality draws its power from its primordialism and ‘this-worldly transcendence’. This ‘primordial pattern of attachment’ provides a bounded space characterized by a particular matrix of language,



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customs, and beliefs constituting a people’s collective consciousness. ‘That is … what these substantive orientations, these bounded patterns of action and beliefs, which are constitutive of a territory are: language, custom, and law. They are all stabilized, objectified expressions of life in which the individual participates’ (Grosby, 1995: 148). And it is precisely this primordial territoriality, by providing a bounded space in which individuals can participate in a shared collective consciousness, which is the basis of, or perhaps even coterminous with, nationality. Nationality and collective consciousness As with the concept of civil society, much of Shils’ work on developing and clarifying his concepts of nations and nationality was influenced by his understanding of Weber’s work. As Athena Leoussi has skilfully demonstrated, much of Shils’ work on nations and nationality had Weberian foundations, though much of what she turns up suggests that Shils actually took some of Weber’s insights in some very different directions. As Leoussi notes, Weber’s unfinished and unrefined thoughts about nations and nationalism were nevertheless important to Shils, who himself recognized the limits of Weber’s work on the subject. ‘Max Weber attributed much importance to the nation as a social and cultural formation. This is, however, more taken for granted than elaborately, systematically treated in his sociological writings; in his political writings it is given considerable prominence, but it is not analysed with the careful attention that he gave to most other features of modern societies’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 229). Certainly one important insight shared by both Shils and Weber was that nations are ‘self-conscious collectivities … a subjective concept (a construct of the human mind) rather than a stable objective entity, that is “in terms of empirical qualities common to those who count as members of the nation”’ (Leoussi, 2013: 1959, 1961). Specifically, Weber seemed to think of the nation as an ‘idea’ or ‘concept’ (Begriff ) rooted in a particular belief in a unique (national) culture. ‘The significance of the “nation” is usually anchored in the superiority, or at least the irreplaceability, of the culture values that are to be preserved and developed only through the cultivation of the peculiarity of the group’ (Weber, [1968] 1978: 925). Perhaps even more explicitly (and importantly for Shils), the collective self-consciousness of the nation was formed around memories. ‘It is this “community of memories” [Erinnerungsgemeinschaft] which … constitutes the ultimately decisive element of “national consciousness”’ (Weber, [1968] 1978: 903). Shils’ description of nationality as a ‘collective self-consciousness’ draws not only on Weber’s characterization of a nation as a ‘self-conscious

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community’, but even more so from Émile Durkheim’s concept of the conscience collective, translated variously as ‘collective’ or ‘common’ consciousness (Leoussi, 2013: 1961). According to Durkheim, the common consciousness, ‘with its emphasis on the commonness of beliefs and sentiments’, is a major factor in the cohesion of pre-modern societies, what Durkheim refers to as Mechanical Solidarity (similar to the ties of Gemeinschaft). Much of Durkheim’s work involved an exploration of the extent to which the conscience collective is eroded by the modern division of labour. He seemed to believe that the common consciousness would ‘largely be displaced by the mutual dependence of people engaged in different yet complementary rounds of life’, the condition he described as ‘organic solidarity’.3 On the other hand, especially in his later work, Durkheim seemed to soften this stark prognostication, arguing instead that while collective consciousness in the conditions of modernity would ‘no longer define the specific norms that pertain to the exercise of differentiated tasks, it is still needed so as to assure the overall coordination and integration of society as a whole’. As Talcott Parsons argued, for Durkheim, ‘the sharing of common values is a constant feature of all systems at whatever level of differentiation’ (Durkheim, 1984: xix). The debt that Shils owes to Durkheim seems very clear, for the ‘sharing of common values’ is crucial to Shils’ understanding of nationality. But if Shils’ understanding of nationality was so closely based on Durkheimian (and Weberian) foundations, it differed in some key ways as well, especially from Weber. Perhaps the most basic point at which Shils and Weber part company is the objective reality of nations. ‘If the concept of “nation” can in any way be defined unambiguously, it certainly cannot be stated in terms of empirical qualities common to those who count as members of the nation’4 (Weber [1915] 1975: 922; emphasis added). This was completely at odds with Shils’ acceptance of the objective reality of nations and nationality. As Leoussi puts it, ‘for Shils, the nation was (not) an “idea,” as Weber had supposed … it was a fact of human life’ (Leoussi, 2013: 1961). But, as we shall see, one of the biggest departures Shils made from Weberian (and, obliquely, Durkheimian) approaches to the study of nations concerned their relationship to modernity. For Weber, the nation, or at least the nation-state, was a manifestation of modern societies. As the next section will show, this created a problem for Shils. The antiquity of nations and nationality By this point, some of Shils’ views about the nature of nations, in particular their origins, should have suggested themselves. It is worth noting that



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in 1995, when Shils published his main work on the subject of nations and nationalism (‘Nation, Nationality, Nationalism and Civil Society’ [1995b] 1997a; emphasis added), the dominant paradigm in the field of nationality studies was the modernist one.5 This is interesting because Shils sets himself as unequivocally opposed to this position. ‘Some writers have contended that nation and nationalism are products of the postrevolutionary epoch in Europe. If they are interpreted to mean that the nation and popular nationalism share closely related histories with the history of modern nations, there is some ground for their argument; otherwise not. The term nation in its contemporary sense reaches far back into the Middle Ages. It is perfectly reasonable to speak of nations in classical antiquity’ (Shils [1995b] 1997a: 192; emphasis added). This is a bold claim, defying the generally dominant modernist paradigm of the time. What sort of arguments did Shils muster to defend his position? Although one finds Shils’ argument for the antiquity of nations and nationality scattered throughout several essays, the general outlines of his position are clear enough, and they rest solidly upon his conviction of the primordiality of a human connection to territory and tradition. Shils’ historical/anthropological account of the origins of nations begins with the growth of populations. The demographic growth erodes ties of kinship and blood while also forcing populations to expand outside their ancient territorial cores. Shils asserts that these populations nevertheless maintained some sort of collective unity based on their traditions and ancestral territory (one is reminded of Weber’s description of the nation as a ‘community of memory’), even if claims about explicit ties to kinship had gradually dissolved. ‘As societies grew in size and territorial extent, they turned more to territoriality as the basis for their unity—which they had to have—in place of more biological primordial criteria’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 194). Or, as one scholar summed this up, ‘the nation is a human adaptation of primordial impulses [i.e. territoriality and nativity] to changing conditions of life’ (Leoussi, 2013: 1962). Yet, ‘nations exist because of the sensitivity of human beings to the primordial facts of descent and territorial location’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 198). This statement is important because it exemplifies the centrality of territoriality, not just as a sort of geographical fact, but as a transcendent, primordial link. As Steven Grosby interpreted the importance of territoriality: ‘the word “territory” refers not merely to a geometrically delineated space; it rather refers to the transcendental significance of that space; it refers to the life-ordering and lifesustaining significance of a space which makes that space into a meaningful structure’ (Grosby, 1995: 148–9). Shils’ ideas about the origins of nations are thus highly nuanced and at the same time crucial to his overall sociological project. The famous

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scholar of nations and nationalism, the late Anthony Smith, characterized Shils’ approach to the subject as ‘cultural primordialism’ (2000: 21). By this he meant that Shils (and others like him, especially Clifford Geertz) held that nations are primordial in the sense that they reflect a set of collectively held traditions, particularly traditions having to do with territoriality of descent (though not necessarily, or even primarily, of actual genetic descent or ‘blood’). Importantly, Shils does not seem to be making a claim about the primordial existence of any particular modern nation, only that nations in general (or perhaps even more precisely, nationality) are primordial. Smith describes this small yet important distinction as between (cultural) primordialists and ‘perennialists’. The latter are distinguished from the former in that they see the roots of particular modern nations going back centuries or even millennia. Thus, while Shils hints that ancient Athens was a nation (‘Could it not be said that Pericles’ Funeral Oration was a moderate nationalist celebration of national achievements?’ [Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 192]), he does not seem to go so far as to argue that ancient Greece was a nation, nor that the ancient Greeks somehow constituted the same nation as the modern Greek nation. While Smith was probably correct to describe Shils as a ‘primordialist’, it seems to me that we need to be very careful that such a classification does not obscure more than it explains about what I actually find to be Shils’ tremendously nuanced approach to the question of nationality and national identity. When we get past Shils’ initial broadside against the modernists, his work, upon closer examination, seem to be less a demolition project of the modernists than an interesting way to combine insights of both them and the ‘primordialists’ (and perhaps even the ‘perennialists’). This project was probably not intentional and seems (like his broader interests in the origins and workings of civil society) to have evolved over the course of his career, beginning some time in the late 1940s and early 1950s when he began an interrogation of the famous distinction between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft as well as the very similar dichotomy of Durkheim, ‘Mechanical’ and ‘Organic’ solidarity (Durkheim, 1984). Shils’ fieldwork and theoretical studies suggested to him that much more of the ‘primordial’ attachments we associate with Gemeinschaft or with Mechanical Solidarity remain powerful in modern societies than is usually thought. ‘As I see it,’ he declared, ‘modern society is no lonely crowd, no horde of refugees fleeing from freedom. It is no Gesellschaft, soulless, egotistical, loveless, faithless, utterly impersonal, and lacking any integrative forces other than interest or coercion. It is held together by an infinity of personal attachments … primordial affinities and a civil sense which is low in many, high in some and moderate in most persons’ (Shils, [1957] 1975a: 131;



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emphasis added). In other words, ‘Shils argued that primordial ties of kinship and religion remained vital even within modern secular societies’ (Smith, 2001: 151). But how does Shils get from describing society as this primordialmodern hybrid to using the same general schema in reference to nations? The link seems to have been drawn from Max Weber’s cursory work on nations and nationalism, itself embedded in his broader project of analysing modernity and modernism. According to Shils, Weber’s ideal-typology of modern society included ‘citizenship with rights and obligations within the national state’ (Shils, [1987] 1997a: 228). Shils was in general agreement with Weber’s analysis of modern society, but needed to fit his own ideas about the persistence of mechanical solidarity into the overall Weberian model. Shils reasoned that the nation, the social group underlying the national state, is ‘a human adaptation of primordial impulses to changing conditions of life [i.e. Modernity]’ (Leoussi, 2013: 1962). It is not actually so difficult to see why Shils is obliged to have a primordialist view of nations and nationality. As we have already seen, his idea of the modern civic order must be based on something, and that something, for him, is nationality. Nationality, in turn, has to come from somewhere. Shils argued that nationality is primordial in the sense that it comes from a very basic human attachment to territory. If this is the case, then it follows that ‘As long as human beings regarded membership in a territorial collectivity, going beyond kinship and ethnicity, as a valid criterion for regarding themselves as members of a distinctive collective unity, there was a rudimentary nationality’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 192; emphasis added). But note here the qualifier ‘rudimentary’. As in other cases already noted, Shils here seems to be leaving the door open to the possibility that nationality (perhaps without any qualifying adjectives) is indeed a characteristic unique to the Weberian disenchanted modern world, but that its roots are ‘primordial’. Put this way, Shils’ ideas about the antiquity or modernity of nations emerges as considerably less bold than at first blush, but it is more consistent both with his Weberian and Durkheimian intellectual influences, as well with his broader sociological project. For what Shils really needs to show in order for his complex sociological structure to make sense is that civil society must rest on a robust foundation, and that such a foundation can only be built on a (let us be brave here and use the word) primordial attachment to territory and tradition. In a condition of Weberian Modernity (or Durkheimian Organic Solidarity) we can call this foundation a ‘nation’. The fact that (for Shils) this primordial attachment to territory and tradition could have also produced nations (‘rudimentary’ or otherwise) in pre-modern epochs is intellectually interesting but, it seems

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to me, almost beside the point as far as Shils’ central concerns about the origins of civil society are concerned. Nations, the state, and modernity Shils’ positioning of the nation in a potentially modern space is further complicated by his ideas regarding the relationship of nation and state. Weber, who as we have seen had only a schematic and underdeveloped concept of the nation, nevertheless clearly regarded the national state as one of the ideal-types that (along with other elements) defined modernity. Shils apparently found this convincing. In his review of Weber’s impact on the social sciences, he enumerates (with apparent approval) Weber’s nine elements that define modernity. Number four on his list is ‘citizenship with rights and obligations within the national state’ (Shils, [1987] 1997a: 228). In fact, as one interrogates Shils’ concept of citizenship, it emerges as a close relative of nationality. He himself recognizes this: ‘citizenship in the narrow sense and nationality in the broad sense, are in some respects quite closely connected with each other’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 206; emphasis added). What does he mean by this? In Shils’ analysis, citizenship entails a certain set of rights and duties that pertain to a resident in a politically bounded territory. In this way, citizenship is indeed similar to nationality. Shils seems to see it, however, as a much narrower, and more explicitly political, identification. As Shils put it: ‘Citizenship pertains to a particular national state. It is enjoyed within the boundaries of the national state; of a territory ruled by a state and by laws the powers of which run up to the boundaries of the territory in question’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 206). This description of citizenship, with its stress on territory, sounds much like Shils’ concept of nationality, and indeed it is. The key difference is that, as he later points out, the rights and duties of citizenship are explicitly tied to the state. ‘The rights enjoyed by an individual as a citizen are civil rights; they are not simply human rights. His citizenship in a particular national state governing a particular bounded territory entitles him to claim that his rights should be respected by his fellow citizens’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 206). The claims of nationality, or nationhood, on the other hand, while tied to the primordiality of territory, do not seem to need a state. And while ‘the nation attains its fullest realization institutionally in the national state; the two—nation and state—are seldom identical’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 188). In other words, citizenship is a purely political category referenced by the relationship between a kind of resident of a state (what we might think of as the ideal type of ‘citizen’) and the institutions of the state itself.



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Interestingly, Shils is very clear that the rights and duties of citizenship ‘refer only to the coercive enforcement of those rights and obligations by the state. It says nothing about the readiness of the other members of society to acknowledge those rights and expectations of members of the society and to accept the obligations to honour those rights’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 207). So why do most citizens, in fact, honour the rights (and expect the reciprocal duties) of their fellow citizens, at least in most cases and most of the time? Shils’ answer is that the bonds of nationality contribute to ‘the readiness to acknowledge the rights of other individuals within one’s own society and the disposition to fulfil obligations to other individuals … . To the extent that such a national collective selfconsciousness exists, we may speak of the society as a nation’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 207). Shils’ construction presents us with a fascinating insight into the relationship between nationality, citizenship, and state. Nationality, as a primordialist category, is clearly antecedent to either citizenship or state, the latter two as intimately related. This construction also presents Shils with a very sophisticated way of having his primordialist cake and eating it too. He can implicitly acknowledge the Weberian claim to the modernity of states, even national states, while comfortably maintaining his position that nationality, that primordial tie that, when all is said and done, makes a national state of citizens ‘with rights and obligations within the national state’ possible. Shils thus turns the entire modernist paradigm on its head. For Shils, ‘modern societies are national not because the nation is new but because it is primordial’ (Leoussi, 2013: 1963). Nations and nationalism(s) So far, we have focused on Shils’ concepts of nationality and nation, the defining element of both being a primordial attachment to a bounded territory and some understanding of kinship. We have also seen how, and why, Shils finds the concepts of nationality and civil society to be so indelibly linked. But if he finds nationality to be a normatively positive force (insofar as he regards civil society as likewise something good), his attitude towards nationalism is distinctly negative. To put it simply, while regarding nationality as essential for civil society, Shils suggested that nationalism is in fact a danger to it. In his own words: ‘When nationality becomes nationalistic, it usually has become uncivil as well; the demand for complete national solidarity has often involved uncivil suppression’ (Shils, [1980] 1997a: 17). But what exactly does Shils mean by ‘nationalism’, and why is it so dangerous to civil society?

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Unfortunately, in contrast to his clear descriptions of nation and nationality, Shils does not give us a clear definition of nationalism. Yet, from the way he talks about it, it is a political and ideological concept, in contrast to the cultural, primordial concept of nationality. It is also posterior to nationality itself. ‘Nationalism arises out of nationality … . It adds emulative, combative, aggressive, bellicose elements to nationality. Hatred is not necessarily part of nationality; it frequently is so in nationalism’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 188). It seems for Shils that nationalism’s real danger is in fact its violent, bellicose nature, which constitutes a threat to civil society. But what exactly is the nature of this threat? Shils indicates that it is dangerous because it introduces the element of violence within a society. ‘Nationalism … is aggressive against persons or groups in its own society. It is against those who disagree with their nationalistic programs and actions.’ Nationalism is thus ‘injurious to the maintenance of those norms [of a pluralistic, civil society]’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 220–1). So Shils finds nationalism to be unamicable towards civil society because it promotes violence against those who disagree with its programme. Yet, there is a strange circularity here. Shils never tells us what the content of the nationalist programme is, only that nationalists often (always?) use force to promote it. Since violence is, by definition, hostile to the maintenance of a civil society, nationalism is therefore necessarily hostile to it. To put it another way, Shils does not tell us whether there is anything intrinsic to the ideology of nationalism itself (or of any particular nationalism) that is problematical regarding civil society. Another way of approaching Shils’ wariness towards nationalism is his understanding of it as an ideology and, more precisely, as a political ideology. It is in this sense that nationalism is such a threat to civil society, not because, perhaps, of anything intrinsic to nationalism itself, but simply by its nature as a political ideology. Shils pointed out that ‘ideological politics are alienative politics’, that is, they ‘attribute supreme significance to one group or class—the nation, the ethnic folk, the proletariat’. As such, they are absolutely hostile to Shils’ conception of civil society (Shils, [1997e] 1997a: 26–7). Shils’ approach to nationalism invites us to make a brief digression and speculate on how Shils’ work fits into the ongoing debate surrounding civic and ethnic nationalism.6 Curiously, Shils himself nowhere addresses the civic versus ethnic nationalism dichotomy. He certainly must have been aware of it since its origins (in the classic work of Hans Kohn [1946]) emerged during the 1940s, as Shils himself was embarking on some of his earliest work related to the subject of nations and nationalism. On the other hand, this absence is perhaps understandable upon further consideration of Shils’ treatment of the phenomenon of nationalism. For Shils,



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nationalism is ipso facto uncivil, so the term ‘civic nationalism’ is an oxymoron. There can be no such thing. On the other hand, nationality is by its nature the foundation of civil society. Thus, all nations (though not all nationalisms) are ‘civic’. Similarly, ‘ethnic nationalism’ is meaningless in Shils’ framework since nations and nationality are different and unrelated from ethnic groups and ethnicity. Conclusions It was Edward Shils who first identified various kinds of social bonds between members of modern societies. In particular, he distinguished between the public, civil ties of the modern state and the primordial ties of family, religious and ethnic groups. Recalling the Durkheimian argument which saw the retention of a kernel of older kinship, moral and religious ties—the similarities of beliefs and consciences in a ‘mechanical solidarity’—even within modern industrial societies with their more individualist … division of labor or ‘organic solidarity’, Shils argued that primordial ties of kinship and religion remained vital even within modern secular societies. (Smith, 2001: 151)

These remarks summarize nicely the main contribution Shils made to Nationalism Studies … without themselves ever mentioning the words nation or nationalism. This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Shils’ work on the subject: the sense in which he approached this field of study as a kind of appendix to his much broader and detailed work on civil society. It seems clear that in his work on the constitution of societies he was thinking in terms of national societies.7 This should not surprise us. He published his main work on nations and nationalism in 1995, the year of his death. The mid-1990s were anyway a kind of high-water mark in Nationalism Studies, and Shils’ article reads in some ways like an attempt to fit his life’s work into the new(ish) scholarly conversation about nations and nationalism. As this chapter has sought to convey, it was a difficult fit. As we have seen, Shils expounded his theory of nationality and nations in explicit and very self-conscious opposition to the modernist orthodoxy of the day. Yet, as I have tried to argue, Shils’ claims about nations and nationalism are careful and nuanced and even make (some) room for a modernist position. Anthony Smith was right to note Shils’ debt to Durkheim; that central to Shils’ project was the softening of the boundary between the Durkheimian categories of ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ solidarity. He might have added that he was simultaneously trying to problematize the boundaries between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. It was certainly in this context that he must have been influenced by Weber’s compelling (but incomplete)

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reflections on the Sektengesellschaft as a kind of bridge between these concepts. Smith is also correct to point out the centrality in Shils’ work of the idea of ‘primordialism’, i.e. the ineluctable existence of certain bonds humans have as an integral part of their nature. The content of this primordialism, however, is somewhat problematic. Smith’s identification of the ‘primordial ties of family, religious and ethnic groups’ are important to Shils, but not, it seems, in the context of his theory of nationality. In fact, as we have seen, Shils goes out of his way to distance himself from associating nationality with ethnic identity, much less any actual biological or ‘blood’ kinship. Instead, the primordialism that lies at the root of Shils’ theory of nationality is based on primordial ties to territory and ‘common descent’. But we must be very careful in delineating what Shils meant by these terms. Between them, the most important concept was certainly territoriality, a personal association with one’s place of birth. This association or connection a person has with the land of his birth is the object of the shared collective consciousness of the nation. It reaches back through time. In the words of Steven Grosby, ‘a territory is a temporally deep structure’ (Grosby, 1995: 149). As with ‘territory’, Shils uses ‘common descent’ in a highly nuanced and extremely circumscribed way. As noted above, he absolutely is not talking about physical or biological kinship. ‘In the inheritance of nationality what is transmitted is “territoriality,” and not “blood,” nor any physical qualities.’ And later on the same page, ‘There is a tendency for residence or territoriality to turn, in the mind, into “blood” or at least “blood-like” physical features’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 199; emphasis added]. Not only that, but it is important to note that Shils is making the argument that the belief among the members of the nation in the primordiality of their connection to a territory is the crucial element in the formation of nationality. As Anthony Smith put it, ‘[Shils did not] regard primordiality as inhering in the objects themselves, but only in the perceptions and emotions they engendered’ (Smith, 2001: 157). As the foregoing quotation makes clear, the importance of some sort of mental recognition or self-consciousness of a nation is crucial for Shils’ theory of nationality, and reflects another debt he owes to Durkheim, in this case his concept of the conscience collective. This concept comes up over and over in Shils’ work on nations and nationality and is absolutely crucial to his theory. As we have seen, Weber also had a sense in which nationality was somehow a concept or idea mutually subscribed to by members of a nation. Along these lines, despite his clear differences, Shils comes very close indeed to some of the foremost advocates of the modernist paradigm.



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Consider the following statement by Shils: ‘Human beings do form themselves into nations when their members do not know each other’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 199). Students of Nationalism Studies will instantly recognize this as a central claim in Anderson’s Imagined Communities ([1983] 2006). Shils thus comes remarkably close to accepting some of the key claims of the modernists. The intellectual rupture seems to focus on the idea of subjectivity. For while Shils might accept the importance of a national collective self-consciousness in which its members ‘do not know each other’, the nation has an objective reality far stronger than that postulated by Anderson, to say nothing of other modernists such as Ernst Gellner or Eric Hobsbawm. For while the Andersonian imagined national community is the result of the dialectical workings of ‘print capitalism’ (or the forces of modern capitalist industrial society for Gellner or Hobsbawm), Shils’ nation has roots both primordial and objective. They are ‘the fact of residence and their feeling that one’s place of residence—on one side of a boundary or another—is of intrinsic value’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 199). But at the same time, as we have seen, the primordiality of the nation itself is not necessarily objective. Shils’ point was that people have a primordial need for a connection to a territory, a home. And this reality is what is objective about his theory. Whether the people in question have a demonstrable, accurate historical (to say nothing of biological) connection to their homeland is absolutely beside the point. What is important is that such a feeling of primordial belonging exists. Anthony Smith is right to declare that this insight is what makes Shils’ theory of nations and nationality so important: ‘It draws attention to the powerful perceptions, beliefs and emotions that can inspire and excite human beings, and rouse them to collective action and self-sacrifice. It reveals how the participants endow certain objects with primordial qualities and base some of their actions on such perceptions and beliefs’ (Smith, 2001: 158). Notes 1 Another definition of civil society, similar to Tocqueville’s formulation, is ‘the independent self-organization of society, the constituent parts of which voluntarily engage in public activity to pursue individual, group, or national interests within the context of a legally defined state–society relationship’ (Weigle and Butterfield, 1992: 3). Similarly, ‘Civil Society is generally intended to identify an arena of (at least potential) freedom outside the state, a space for autonomy, voluntary association and plurality or even conflict, guaranteed by the kind of “formal democracy” which has evolved in the West’ (Wood, 1990: 63).

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2 For example, ‘Nationality is a phenomenon fundamentally of collective selfconsciousness. National self-consciousness is a state of mind, a state of belief’ (Shils, [1995b] 1997a: 188). 3 Some have argued that after his publication of The Division of Labour in 1893, in subsequent work Durkheim considerably modified this prediction, and instead came to argue that elements of Mechanical Solidarity could continue to exist within a modern Division of Labour. 4 ‘“Nation” ist ein Begriff, der, wenn üeberhaupt eindeutig, dann jedenfalls nicht nach empirischen gemeinsamen Qualitäeten der ihr Zugerechneten definiert warden kann.’ 5 For a very good overview of ‘The Modernist Orthodoxy’, see Smith 2000: 27–34. 6 For an excellent overview of the historiography of the civic/ethnic nation(alism) debate see Smith 2000: 15–20. 7 I am indebted to Professor Steven Grosby for this insight.

9

Shils and the intellectuals Jefferson Pooley

Introduction No topic so consistently preoccupied Edward Shils, at every stage of his career, as the intellectual. Most of his reflections concerned the intellect­ ual’s fraught relationship with the societies that harbour them. This chapter traces Edward Shils’ distinctive conception of the intellectual – as indispensable to, but all too often an opponent of, social order. During his undergraduate years in the late 1920s, Shils had already become fascinated with, and repulsed by, the tendency that he observed among intellectuals to despise their own societies. His aversion to intellectual disloyalty was a constant throughout his adult life, though his specifically ‘Shilsian’ take on the intellectual and his society would only cohere, in a sophisticated, original, and consistent way, in the 1950s. This chapter reconstructs Shils’ encounter with the downcast inte­ llectual, first as a precocious reader of Gustave Flaubert, Hippolyte Taine, Hendrik de Man, Robert Michels, and, above all, Georges Sorel. It was Sorel’s chiliastic politics of heroic violence which, in its purist clarity, helped disclose the transcendent moral impulse that, to varying degrees, leads intellectuals to judge their societies harshly. When, after the Second World War, the moral ideal seemed spent even within socialist movements, Shils observed its traces in the complaints of ex-radicals – ‘disappointed and broken-down Trotskyites and Edelmarxisten, most of Frankfurt provenance’ (1972c: xi). Once Shils, in the post-war years, came to identify intellectual crankiness about social disintegration with the threat of real social disintegration, the failure to recognize the invisible lines of consensus in society was tantamount to fraying them. Soc­ iety’s loose consensus depends on public belief, Shils argued, which in turn depends on the social picture put forward by intellectuals. These ‘persons with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred’ ([1958a] 1972a: 3) could help support the fragile achievements of civil politics, but he was not optimistic.

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Shils first published his mature theory of the intellectual in the late 1950s. In ‘The Intellectuals and the Powers’ ([1958a] 1972a) and subsequent work, he classified intellectuals as those rare individuals drawn to the sacred. Every society throughout human history has had individuals like this – a minority drawn to contemplate the ultimate nature of things, and to express its reflections in fables, poetry, art, and ritual performance. The original and sustaining impulse for intellectual work, Shils claimed, was religious: before the rise of secular traditions of intellectual life in the modern West, most intellectuals wrestled with the ‘ultimate or at least with what lies beyond the immediate concrete experience’ through religious symbols (Shils, [1958a] 1972a: 16). Even secular intellectuals share with religion the preoccupation with the sacred, and the ‘aspiration to enter into intimate contact with it’ (Shils, [1958a] 1972a: 16): Intellectual action of an intense kind contains and continues the deeper religious attitude, the striving for contact with the most decisive and significant symbols and the realities underlying those symbols. It is therefore no stretching of the term to say that science and philosophy, even when they are not religious in a conventional sense, are as concerned with the sacred as religion itself. (Shils, [1958a] 1972a: 16)

With this transhistorical, religious substrate in mind, Shils made his second major claim: that intellectuals, in every society, are indispensable to social order. He spelled out several major functions that intellectuals serve, in what amounts to a normative standard. Through preaching and writing, they connect the rest of the population (the laity), however fleetingly, to remote symbols and the wider universe. By example and through their creations, intellectuals also stand as models for a society’s cultural life. In both respects intellectuals foster the laity’s attachment to the ‘central value system’ (Shils, [1958a] 1972a: 7). More directly, intellectuals are often in positions of administrative power, and otherwise serve as counsellor to the sovereign. From Aristotle and Alexander, through to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ‘Brain Trust’, intellectuals have furnished advice to princes and rulers, and occasionally – in the case of rare figures like William Gladstone – held power themselves. Even the prevailing ideals of modern politics, including nationalism and liberal constitutionalism, are the handiwork of intellectuals. In the ‘Powers’ essay and other writings from the period, Shils wrote in unmistakably reverent terms about his fellow intellectuals. He plainly identifies with the intellectual’s need to ‘penetrate beyond the screen of immediate concrete experience’ ([1958a] 1972a: 3). But Shils’ romanticism was tempered by what he described as an irresolvable tension between the



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intellectual’s transcendent impulse and his attachments to his society. The intellectual’s orientation to the ideal, and to the universal, generates at least a measure of alienation from his polity, its people, and its leaders. The disaffection that results is both inescapable and potentially healthy. By challenging inherited values, intellectuals supply alternative models for integrating their societies – ‘a crucial part of the intellectual heritage of any society’ (Shils, [1958a] 1972a: 7). And the intellectual’s alienation can, and often is, bounded: a commitment to civil politics and constitutional order is compatible with sensitivity to the sacred. But the same orientation to transcendence has, especially in modern times, led intellectuals to reject their nations and leaders with totalizing zeal. Many have embraced what Shils had come to call ‘ideological politics’: a commitment to the revolutionary reordering of society. This apocalyptic tendency of modern intellectuals is what Shils set out to explain and refute. So Shils’ work on intellectuals was a redemptive project, centred on attachment: how, and in what ways, might more intellectuals come to feel affinity for the societies in which they live? He located some living examples, including the scientific community in general (e.g. Shils, 1954b) and post-war British intellectuals in particular (Shils, 1955b). He also held out hope, in the mid-1950s at least, that ‘ideological enthusiasm’ might be on the wane (Shils, 1955c: 53). It is the task of the ‘statesman and the responsible intellectual,’ he wrote in the ‘Powers’ essay, to locate an ‘optimum balance’ between transcendence and civility – a ‘requirement for order and continuity in public life and for the integration of the wide reaches of the laity into society’ ([1958a] 1972a: 21). Social solidarity, perhaps especially in complex, pluralist societies, depends on intellectual attachment. Even during his brief end-of-ideology flirtation of the mid-1950s, Shils was quick to concede that a disturbingly large stratum of intellectuals in the West, and in the postcolonial ‘new states’, clung to millenarist politics. And even those who had lost their revolutionary faith all too frequently brandished their deflated ideals as weapons against their own societies and mass cultures. Both modes of rejection were intimately familiar to Shils, and had been for decades. Shils’ education By his own account, Shils’ undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania were a four-year immersion in self-guided reading. The sheer volume that he recalls – Durkheim’s entire oeuvre, for example (Shils, 1975e: xix) – is only plausible in light of Shils’ lifelong and voracious bookishness. He majored in French Literature, and focused on nineteenthcentury writers and, in particular, Gustave Flaubert. In the course of his

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literary readings – mostly French, but also American, English, German, and Russian (Shils, 1982c: xxi, 1975e: xiv) – Shils also consumed a ‘vast amount of nineteenth-century political and belletrist literature’ (Shils, 1972b: vii). It puzzled him that so many of these writers and thinkers, Flaubert above all, rejected their own societies with such venom. Intrigued and repulsed, Shils went about trying to understand these writers’ scabrous alienation: ‘Why did writers, historians, philosophers and other intellectuals, some great and all interesting, feel such revulsion for their own societies, for the institutions through which they were ruled and the persons who ruled them?’ (Shils, 1972b: vii).1 In many ways, this question became Shils’ core preoccupation throughout his career, though his explanation for intellectuals’ ‘comprehensive rejection of modern society’ (Shils 1982c: xxii) would move through several iterations before settling in the 1950s. It was this initial puzzle that drove Shils to the literature of Marxism and its critics. Based on his later remembrances, it is difficult to place encounters with specific authors in sequence, but he claimed special importance for Hendrik de Man’s Psychology of Socialism ([1926] 1928), Robert Michels’ Political Parties ([1911] 1915), and the works of Georges Sorel, especially Reflections on Violence ([1908] 1930). These books, read alongside Marxist tracts and the work of French counter-revolutionary historian Hippolyte Taine, helped Shils arrive at a tentative explanation for all that intellectual discontent (Shils, 1975e: xiv; 1972c: vii). Shils’ thesis was that intellectuals’ attraction to Marxism, as well as the broader intellectual contempt for society, had as their source a chiliastic moral impulse to heroic transcendence – expressed, in its pure form, by Sorel. Shils claimed that his reading of the first volume of Taine’s Origines de la France contemporaire (1875–93) was especially important to his emerging analysis of intellectuals. Taine, the philosopher and amateur historian, wrote his six-volume history of the Revolution after the humiliations of 1870–71 – the Prussian defeat and the aftermath of the Paris Commune (see Pitt, 1998). Taine, whose historiographical care was quickly and decisively impugned, was nevertheless the leading Orléanist critic of the Third Republic and its liberal rationalist leadership (Peyre, 1949: 66n). Taine used Tocqueville’s (1856 [1998]) analysis of the ancien régime as his starting point, but he went much further than Tocqueville (or Burke) in laying the blame for the Revolution on Enlightenment ideals. Like Tocqueville, he pointed to the abstract rationalism of the philosophes as a major progenitor to what Taine famously called the ‘Jacobin mind’. But Taine extended his irrationalist philosophical anthropology – his ‘beast in man’ pessimism – from the masses to the Enlightenment standard-bearers themselves: their humanitarian politics, their rationalist educational zeal,



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their law-making hubris – all of these, for Taine, were actually driven by unconscious resentment. The beast was still there, only – to use anachronistic language – repressed and sublimated into Enlightenment and Revolutionary ideals. The masked irrationalism of the Revolutionary leadership and their philosophe forebears was all the more dangerous for its concealment. Taine’s recourse to unconscious (and irrationalist) explanation for outwardly humane and rational thought was one direct and indirect source for many of the ‘psychological’ analyses of socialism in the late 1890s and into the twentieth century – including Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie du Socialisme (1898). There is no evidence that Shils absorbed the particulars of Taine’s analysis of the Enlightenment unconscious.2 Shils’ end-of-college explanation for the societal hatred of literary men did not, for example, rest on a Tainelike thesis of atavistic beastliness. Indeed, Shils would come to attribute intellectuals’ crankiness and sometime Promethean political impulses to a perfectionist moral ideal that rendered protean politics or bourgeois culture repugnant by contrast. More than anything, it was Taine’s obsessive focus on Rousseau as chief antecedent villain of the Revolution that, in combination with Shils’ own reading of Sorel and de Man, helped identify the heroic ethical fervour that, to Shils, drove radical politics and this-worldly disdain. Taine was not the first, and certainly not the last, to link Rousseau’s writings to catastrophic Revolutionary ideals, but his lengthy and detailed denunciation in the Origines influenced Shils’ own reading of Rousseau. Shils’ reaction to Rousseau was, however, ambiguous and, in one respect, even admiring: for all his ‘abhorrence’ with the notion of a volunté générale, Shils was intrigued by the idea of individual absorption into some transcendent order. He reacted in a similar, almost schizophrenic manner to Sorel and to the ethical socialism of de Man and R. H. Tawney – in various memoirs, he claimed that these thinkers had helped to stir his appreciation for the necessity of moral ideals in binding societies together (Shils, 1975e: xx, 1950). But the ideal of complete absorption, linked as it was for Rousseau, Sorel, and indeed Marx to the promise of total individual freedom, struck him in these undergraduate years as ‘both repugnant to me morally and unrealizable as well’ (Shils, 1975e: xiv). Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’ Romanticism, his reverse-Hobbesian chastisement of society, his fiery denunciations of inequality and ancient privilege, his popular consent-derived contractualism, and above all his apoplectic moralism – Shils recoiled from these, but came to understand the ethical impulse, in particular, as key to his original question. This ethical impulse was clarified further for Shils in his encounters with the works of Michels, de Man, and especially Sorel (Shils, 1972b: vii,

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1982c: xxii). All three thinkers, in distinct arguments, relayed to Shils important critiques of orthodox Marxism and, in Michels and Sorel, of parliamentary socialism as well. De Man and Sorel amplified his interest in the cohesive role of shared belief, an interest that, of course, would prove central to his later analyses of the underpinnings of social order. But the core insight that Shils gleaned from his readings was his sense for the underlying moral drives that help explain intellectual discontent. On a number of occasions, Shils referred to Michels’ Political Parties ([1911] 1915) as an important undergraduate encounter (e.g. Shils, 1972b: vii). Michels’ study was, among other things, an empirical debunking of Germany’s Social Democratic Party – which, in contrast to its democratic socialist ideals, he found machine-like, bureaucratized, and dominated by a self-serving bourgeois elite. Michels famously extrapolated from his findings the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ – that hierarchy is an unavoidable feature of all organizations. His downcast take on what he called the ‘problem of democracy’ in 1911 had, by the 1919 second edition, given way to full alliance with the ‘scientific opponents of democracy’ (Scaff, 1981: 1281). The realist critique of the democratic (and socialist) ideal, Michels’ as well as Mosca’s and Pareto’s, remained a life-long influence on Shils’ own thinking about democratic politics, but after the Second World War Shils’ endorsement of their picture was always qualified.3 It was, instead, Michels’ disillusioned radicalism itself – the contrast between his initially high ideals and his Machiavellian conclusions – that helped Shils along in his effort to understand intellectual alienation. Michels’ realism was so bleak and despondent because, measured against his Herculean ideals, it amounted to a cold bath. He had joined the Social Democratic Party as a reform-minded ethical socialist; his differences with the Party’s leaders had led Michels to an association, starting in 1905, with Sorel and syndicalism. Sorel, in this period, was composing the Reflections, and attracted Michels to his anti-institutional politics of heroic direct action. On the encouragement of Max Weber – who dismissed Michels’ syndicalism, but was impressed by his analytic acumen – Michels published his first study of the Party in Weber’s Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik in September 1906, deliberately timed as a provocation to his erstwhile Party colleagues gathered at their annual Congress. As early as 1907, Michels drifted from the syndicalists too, for their failure to live up to their own high ideals. The 1911 publication of Political Parties registered Michels’ steady disillusionment with the failures of political reality as well as actually existing radicalism. Weber, in correspondence, repeatedly chastised Michels for his naïve hopes and his despairing conclusions about democracy, which Weber found far too sweeping. Michels’ bitter disappointment, Weber observed, was the



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predictable flipside to his absurdly perfectionist ideals. He was, in Weber’s term, a Gesinnungsethiker gripped by the desire for ethical purity, and predictably chastened at the world’s corruption. Michels’ own shifting allegiances over the years – from ethical socialism, to syndicalism, to scientific elitism, to nationalism, and then to Fascism – seemed to bear out Weber’s observations. Shils implies that Michels’ book served as a model of disappointed radicalism only in the context of his undergraduate project to understand intellectual alienation. He certainly did not know about the Weber connection until a few years later – and then only through Marianne Weber’s memoirs. He also probably lacked knowledge of Michels’ political evolution on first reading, though the book itself openly betrays its author’s radical disillusionment. In any event, Shils made the pendulum-like connection between radical hope and bitter disappointment in his reading of Sorel. And the category of the post-war God-that-failed ex-Communist is analysed by Shils, in the 1950s, in just these terms. Hendrik de Man, the Belgian socialist thinker and prominent Depression-era parliamentarian and party leader, wrote his Psychology of Socialism in 1926 while studying in Weimar Germany. De Man became famous for his 1930s ‘plan-de-Man’ call for wide-scale government intervention in the Belgian economy – and infamous for his 1940 collaboration with the Nazis, which probably accounts for his obscurity today (Hansen, 1981; Pels, 1991). Psychology of Socialism, as Stephen Turner (1999: 127–9) points out, was one expression of a general crisis of Marxism in the 1920s in the aftermath of the failed post-world-war Central European revolutions, Lenin’s vanguardist revolution against Kapital, and above all the apparent quiescence of the working class. The originality of de Man’s books rests on its critique of Marxism’s psychological myopia – its failure to understand (and thereby cultivate) the traditional moral underpinnings of working-class discontent and its corresponding blindness to the distinct motivation of (mostly bourgeois) socialist intellectuals. Tradition, de Man argued, did not weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living as, in the Marxist view, a residual form of false consciousness. Unfulfilled, often Christian ethical principles, for de Man, are the motivation for workers’ embrace of socialism. De Man also dismissed the notoriously thin account of the intellectual in orthodox Marxist theory. Like many others, he was haunted by Socialist and Communist Party ‘embourgeoisement’ and bureaucratization, in part on account of Michels’ realist critique of the German Social Democratic Party (Pels, 2002: 284). De Man hoped that by unmasking the revolutionary intellectual’s distinct motives he could dampen their ‘chiliastic expectations’ and thereby recruit them to his evolutionist socialist vision. Leftist

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intellectuals, he argued, are motivated by resentment of their ‘unrecognized genius’; though they often embrace the ‘science’ of Marxism, they are driven, ultimately, by the Fabian ideal that in the future ‘the acquisitive motive of the capitalist and the worker will be replaced by a new motive, that of service to community’. De Man insisted that this ideal is really a ‘desire to make all members of the community into intellectuals’ (1926 [1928]: 222). Shils later acknowledged that de Man’s sensitivity to society-wide traditional beliefs had an impact on his then-embryonic thinking about social order. But de Man’s most important contribution, especially in light of Shils’ undergraduate project to understand intellectual antinomianism, was his analysis of the unconscious motives of left intellectuals. De Man had suggested that intellectual chiliasm derives from a contrast between a perfectionist moral ideal and the grubbiness of everyday politics and culture. This is precisely the contrast that Shils observed, in apotheotic terms, in Georges Sorel’s ‘heroic sublimity’ (Shils, 1950: 19). Referring to his undergraduate reading of Michels and de Man, Shils wrote: ‘These writers made me ask the question: Why did writers, historians, philosophers and other intellectuals, some great and all interesting, feel such revulsion for their own societies, for the institutions through which they were ruled and the persons who ruled them?’ (1972c: vii)

It was Sorel who provided Shils the key to his puzzle of the discontented intellectual – though not because Sorel’s general-strike syndicalism was especially influential. For Shils, Sorel was important, instead, as an especially clear window into the intellectual soul, unobstructed by the apathy, resignation, or bohemianism that is, in so many others, its surface manifestation. Sorel’s ethical extremism was, in a sense, the purest expression of a moral ideal that other intellectuals harbour too in less apparent ways. Sorel, Shils recalled in a memoir (1975e: xiv), ‘made an unpleasant but nonetheless deep impression on me’. Along with de Man, Taine, and others, Shils credited Sorel for helping to reinforce his nascent belief in the ‘notion that a society has a set of moral and cognitive beliefs, adherence to which is a condition of its survival’ (1975e: xiv). But it was Sorel’s pure chiliasm, his unambiguous orientation to ultimate values, and his all-ornothing moral temperament that provided, for Shils, a glimpse into the intellectual psyche – and, by extension, a way to understand intellectuals’ ‘oppositional mentality’ as derivative of a transcendent moral ideal (see, e.g., Shils, [1957] 1975a: 138–9). Sorel’s rejection of existing society was near-total. He was, in a sense, a Flaubert engagé who despised, especially, bourgeois decadence and corruption. His heightened sensitivity to hypocrisy and hollow idealism made



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him a critic, too, of Marxism and especially parliamentary socialism. Indeed, his observations about the inevitability of elite dominance famously fuelled the democratic ‘realism’ of Mosca and Pareto – only, for Sorel, the corruption of bourgeois and socialist parties could be elided, in apoplectic violence. He rejected not just Marxist economism but even its implicit utopia as unrealistic and intellectualist; he remained a Marxist only if ‘social poetry’ counts as Marxism. Especially in his late nineteenth-century years, Sorel was a conservative moralist and always, even as a syndicalist, rejected the typical leftist call for sexual emancipation. He claimed respect for ancient tradition and especially religious sentiment, for they draw on the fundamental human capacity to believe, the ‘ faculté mystique’. Sorelian myths, and the revolutionary myth of the general strike in particular, are meaning-drenched calls to action, designed to appeal to that non-rational will to believe. Sorel largely accepted Gustave Le Bon’s portrait of crowd psychology, but without Le Bon’s trepidation; in a violent mob, man has reached closest to his irrational essence – closest, that is, to that ‘profounder region of our mental life’ (Sorel, 1908 [1930]: 30; see also Nye, 1973, 1977). The myth of the general strike was to be a rousing call to purifying violence, a striving for ‘total and simultaneous emancipation’ (Sorel, 1987: 109). For Sorel, the ethic was in the act itself, the cleansing violence – and not in any imagined, placid end-state. The general strike, in this sense, was for Sorel an uncompromising refusal to live in the world as it is, in all its squalid corruption. In his unceasing quest for ethical regeneration, Sorel moved through conservative moralism, Marxism, syndicalism, authoritarian traditionalism (in 1910), and then on to sympathetic Bolshevism before his death in 1922. Common to all his political guises, Shils observed, was a single principle: ‘the highest good is the heroic (i.e. aggressive) action performed with a sense of impersonal consecration to the ends of a restricted, delimited group bound together in fervent solidarity and impelled by a passionate confidence in its ultimate triumph in some cataclysmic encounter’ (1950: 18). Sorel’s impact was so profound that Shils outlined a book on Sorel while an undergraduate, which he was still planning to write when he arrived in Chicago in 1932 (Shils, 1982b: xxii; [1957] 1975a: 119). Shils’ picture of the discontented intellectual, when he left the campus and Philadelphia, was by no means fully formed; his mature theory, with reference to the ‘sacred’ and ‘earthly centres’, would emerge more than twenty-five years later, and only after a second intense encounter with Sorel in the late 1940s. But his youthful reading of Sorel – and also, in different ways, of Michels and de Man – provided an answer to that original enigma: ‘why Flaubert hated

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his country and his fellow countrymen as passionately as he did’ (Shils, 1995a: 223). In a memoir (1982c: xxii), he recalled that his undergraduate reading of Sorel, de Man, and others helped him gain a ‘better understanding’ of intellectuals’ ‘comprehensive rejection of modern society’, on the grounds, he wrote, of its ‘materialistic disregard for the realm of transcendent things’. Shils and social thought Shils spent the first half of the 1930s acquiring detailed knowledge of twentieth-century German social thought. He spent the second half of that decade fretting alongside German refugees about the fate of modern society. Both encounters helped shape his aggrieved response, after the war, to the criticism of American culture by fellow intellectuals. Like many American intellectuals in the 1930s, Shils was forced to make sense of the economic Depression of that decade – which, as he later recalled, he ‘learned from the experience of my own family and our neighbours as well as from my experience as a social worker in New York and Chicago’ (Shils, 1975e: xxix). But Shils was not, like his fellow intellectuals, primarily oriented to the American Depression or even to the limited American critique of democratic theory. He was, as he put it, ‘brought up intellectually’ in France, the UK, and Germany; the ascendance of the Nazis and other Fascist regimes were ‘events of almost overwhelming significance’ to him (1975e: xxix). His ‘exiled friends’ were the living embodiments of a collapsed society – the scattered and scarred remnants of a revered intellectual culture (1975e: xxix). Many of them were victims, too, of the regime’s violent – and ultimately genocidal – anti-Semitism. Shils’ fieldwork among Nazi sympathizers on Chicago’s North Side, in 1941, was almost certainly motivated by his own desire to understand the German catastrophe and its prospects in America (see Shils, [1957] 1975a: 134; 1975a: xxiii). By the time Shils graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1931, he had already developed a deep reverence for German scholarship. He later claimed that his interest went back all the way to his childhood: he remembered visiting the University’s museum of Middle Eastern antiquities when he was about ten, and noticed then that many of the exhibit descriptions indicated that the originals were in Berlin (Shils, 1972b: xi). By the late 1920s, as an undergraduate, he began to teach himself the language by struggling, ‘word for word’, through Max Weber’s posthumous Wirtschaftsgeschichte [General Economic History] ([1923] 1927) and the first volume of Werner Sombart’s Der moderne Kapitalismus [Modern Capitalism] (1916) (Shils, 1995a: 221). He recalls spending his evenings



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‘looking up most words in the Muret Saunders dictionary’, without much comprehension: ‘I would vaguely decipher a whole sentence sometimes’ (1995a: 221). After graduating from Penn in the midst of the Depression, Shils spent a year in New York – he later called it an ‘enthusiastic weltschmerz’ – as a social worker in training (Shils, 1981b: 186). He apparently devoted most of his time to reading: ‘That year was spent in delighted discovery of the scintillating insights of Georg Simmel, helpless pondering on Dilthey’s Einleitung (Introduction) and, in the salt-mine-like labour in reading word for word Weber’s Das antike Judentum (Ancient Judaism), which caused me to have to look up almost every word’ (Shils, 1995a: 222). His German gradually improved over the course of the year, so much so that he reports reading Rilke’s Notebooks with ‘some reasonable understanding’ (1995a: 222). By the time he left New York, he had acquired the ‘notion that German professors were the true professors, the very idea of professors’ (Shils, 1981b: 179). The Humboldtian university would remain, throughout his life, his academic ideal. Shils left for Chicago in the autumn of the following year, 1932, with the hope of studying at the University of Chicago, and soon found work as a social worker in what was then called the ‘Black Belt’ (Shils, 1981b: 186). A childhood friend, just returned from his own study at the University, had enticed Shils by his account of the economist Frank H. Knight’s ‘somber and unremitting search for truth’ (Shils, 1995a: 222). Shils was also drawn west by the sociologist Robert E. Park, whom he had read as an undergraduate. With Park travelling in Asia at the time, Shils arranged to meet Louis Wirth, the young sociologist and former Park student, on his first day in Chicago (Shils, 1981b: 186). Shils had been impressed by Wirth’s The Ghetto (1928), which he had read – of course – at Penn. Though Shils would later come to think of him as a relative lightweight, Wirth’s recent trip to Germany was proof enough of his intellectual stature. ‘Meeting with Wirth was, for me, to be in contact with Germany. To be in contact with German universities was to be in contact with the great tradition of learning’ (Shils, 1981b: 186). Wirth recognized his student’s grasp of German and invited Shils a few months later to serve as his research assistant. Wirth soon recruited Shils to help translate Karl Mannheim’s Ideologie und Utopie [Ideology and Utopia] ([1929] 1936) – a translation that Shils largely completed on his own. Shils served as the sole translator of Mannheim’s next book, Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus [Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction] ([1929] 1940), and Shils and the Hungarian émigré struck up an intense, if also complicated, friendship that lasted until Mannheim’s death in 1947 (see Pooley, 2006: 86–100, 132–50; 2007).

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It was during this early Chicago period that Shils first read Weber’s ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf ’ [‘Science as a Vocation’] ([1919] 1946a), which, as he noted frequently, made ‘a great impression on me’. As for so many others, Weber’s Heidelberg address would become one of Shils’ guiding texts, then and for the rest of his life. Weber’s warnings against the ‘miserable monstrosities’ of the ‘academic prophecy’ – alongside his wary treatment of the ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ ([1919] 1946b) – would provide, for Shils, a standpoint to critique the political Prometheanism of the intellectual Left (Shils, 1972b: vii).4 Indeed, as he later (1975e: xxx) remarked, the essay helped make sense of his own undergraduate thoughts on the antinomian intellect. In the course of his work for Wirth and Mannheim, Shils became acquainted with a number of intellectual refugees from the Nazi regime – including Hans Speier, Alexander von Schelting, Ernst Fränkel, Hans Gerth, Franz Neumann, and Mannheim himself. These encounters were significant for Shils in a number of fascinating ways. Speier and von Schelting, for example, helped wrest Shils from his embrace of a Mannheimderived epistemology centred on the social genesis of ideas (Shils, 1995a: 225, 231; Kettler and Meja, 1995). As part of his help to a late-emigrating Gerth, to take another example, Shils heavily edited (and may have largely written) Gerth’s well-known (1940) paper on the Nazi Party (Shils, [1957] 1975a: 115–16; Oakes and Vidich, 1999). His immersion in the émigrés’ often frantic attempts to explain the Weimar collapse and the nature of the Nazi regime – notably including Fränkel’s The Dual State (1941), which Shils translated so that Fränkel could establish himself in the AngloAmerican world (Shils, 1975a: xxiv) – exposed him to a succession of bleak accounts, set in a despairing and traumatized key. His friendships with the émigrés – the dispersed and shell-shocked remnants of the Weimar intellectual culture that was, in a sense, his first academic passion – seems to have blackened his already dark mood. Shils’ own crisis, put differently, was an amplified and distinctly tangible version of the crisis in American liberalism that had, by the mid-1930s, emerged out of the Depression and the distant rumble of Fascism.5 Through his contact with the intellectual refugees, Shils was bathed in their acrid, ‘disaster-triumphant’ distress. Franz Neumann (1953: 13), in his haunting commentary, described the psychological trauma of many émigrés: ‘Being compelled to leave their homeland, they thus suffered the triple fate of a displaced human being with property and family; a displaced scholar; and a displaced homo politicus.’ Even among the intellectuals that Shils came to know, there existed an enormous political and scholarly diversity – not everyone experienced Frankfurt-style ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ estrangement, especially after adjusting to American or



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English conditions. But there was, from Mannheim to Speier to Fränkel, a sense of despair and disorientation at the violent shattering of German civilization. The Weimar collapse greatly amplified the already widespread cynicism among intellectuals concerning the viability of consensual, democratic politics. If the two students of Weber, Mannheim and Carl Schmitt, could be thought to offer, in the 1920s, competing responses to Weber’s qualified critique, in particular, of democratic rhetoric – one hopeful, the other coldly cynical – the Weimar collapse settled the matter, for many émigrés including Mannheim, in Schmitt’s tragic favour. The Frankfurt scholars, including Neumann, as well as many others, had come to accept Schmitt’s decisionist critique of parliamentary democracy, without of course conceding Schmitt’s normative inferences (Kennedy, 1987). Schmitt-derived or otherwise, there was widespread pessimism about the prospects for stable liberal democracy in the émigré community, especially in the years before the war (Gunnell, 1993: 165–74). Many of the émigrés, including those Shils knew, like Mannheim and Fränkel, laboured in writing to make sense of the Nazi calamity, and most of these – including Paul Tillich (1934), Emil Lederer (1940), Erich Fromm (1941), and Sigmund Neumann (1942), to name a few published before Shils joined the war effort – are the works of palpably shaken men. For Mannheim ([1929] 1940), the world really did seem a polar night of icy darkness. So Shils formed his profound reverence for German academic achievement just as his beloved Weimar conversation was coming to a violent close. At the same time, he came to link European intellectuals’ otherworldly aspirations with the barbarous collapse of their own societies; he held them partly responsible for the calamities in Germany, Italy, and Soviet Russia. If Sorel had served as Shils’ archetypical instance of intellectual Prometheanism, Mannheim came to seem like Sorel’s shadow – the purest expression of after-the-fall intellectual dejection. When Shils, after the war, came to see intellectuals as the indispensable wardens of social order, he judged the émigrés’ disintegrative despair to be an abdication, and a dangerous one. This was, in the end, the treason of the intellectuals: their doctrines of breakdown were untrue and deadly. Even the tragic Weimar collapse itself could seem to Shils (1972c: vii), in these later years, as a kind of self-immolation: ‘It seemed such a pity to me that the intellectuals should have been responsible for destroying a society which in so many respects had conferred such benefits on intellectuals.’ Shils’ worldview Like so many other American social scientists, Shils spent the years after the United States’ entry into the Second World War working for the

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government. After brief stints in 1942 at the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service and the Office of War Information, Shils joined the London branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In the war’s last year, he worked on the Allied command’s Psychological Warfare Division, interviewing German prisoners of war (Shils, 1948). Shils’ time in Europe transformed his worldview across a range of preoccupations, including his picture of the intellectual (Turner, 1999; Pooley, 2007). Shils’ contacts in London, with English and émigré intellectuals, helped along his new understanding, as did his intense study, in this period, of literature on early modern English religious tolerance. Above all, his wartime research on German prisoners of war contributed to his changed view: In trying to explain the extraordinary tenacity of the Wehrmacht in the face of certain defeat, Shils came to realize that close primary ties among small units – and not diffuse attachments to Nazism or the Fatherland – accounted for the soldiers’ will to fight. On reflection, Shils came to see the persistence of primary ties as an overlooked feature of modern life – a feature that helped to undermine the more dissensual picture those around him had clung to in the pre-war years (Pooley, 2006: 121–7). Shils, working with Morris Janowitz and Henry Dicks, interviewed dozens of German prisoners of war with the question of tenacity in mind: why did German soldiers maintain the fight, and with such disciplined resolution (Lerner, 1949: 109–10, 138; Shils, [1957] 1975a: 116)? Their obstinacy seemed to defy all the battlefield indicators that pointed, by late 1943, to near-certain Allied victory. If the German troops were resigned to inevitable defeat – Shils found that they indeed were – then why didn’t they desert, surrender, or collapse? The mystery was only made more shadowy by the finding that soldiers, for the most part, were not National Socialist faithful, nor were they especially patriotic. Their rather sturdy morale could not be explained by delusions of battlefield optimism nor by fight-to-die belief commitments (Shils, [1957] 1975a: 116–18; 1975e: xxiii– xiv; 1988a: 266–7). The solidarity of the soldiers’ smallest units had ‘impressed’ Shils – their loyalty to one another, their sense of camaraderie, their desire for esteem in their fellows’ eyes (Shils, [1957] 1975a: 116–17). He came to regard these small-group attachments as the key fuel that kept the soldiers fighting. The Wehrmacht itself, Shils argued, could be conceived as unit-sized solidarities knit together – as a network of cohesive small groups. Shils was, of course, also preoccupied with the broader question of social order, and the primary group seemed to help explain how it is that modern societies manage to hang together. Even if large-scale societies could not take on



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the properties of small groups – and Shils remained sceptical of the vision he ascribed to Charles Horton Cooley, that of one big primary group – the overall stability of these societies depend, nevertheless, on a substrate of small-group loyalty. Though in later accounts Shils admitted that he had had trouble in these years explaining how primary group ties translate into national-scale order, he became convinced that these groups mediated – absorbed and redeployed somehow – the appeals of ideology and national symbolism. He did not dismiss the importance of National Socialist belief, patriotic pleas, nor the bureaucratic chain of command; but for most of the troops, these were not the salient factors in their will to fight (Shils, 1975e: xxiv; 1988a: 267). In the immediate post-war years Shils and Janowitz ([1948] 1975a) wrote up their results in a now-classic paper. Primary groups, they argued, are modernity’s answer to scale and impersonality: these clusters provide otherwise-scarce affective sustenance while at the same time remain linked up, through member-mediators, to the more expansive bonds of nationalism and belief. Shils’ observations, readings, and contacts in wartime London gave him, too, a new and half-formed appreciation for the distinct and particular achievements of the English liberal tradition (Pooley, 2006: 127–31). In a 1975 memoir, Shils recalled reading deeply in the literature on religious dissent and toleration in seventeenth-century England, though he never published in the area (Shils, 1975e: xxiii).6 Shils’ studies of English religious toleration helped to shape his emerging attentiveness to an English tradition of elite and civil governance that had, since the eighteenth century, been adapting successfully to the emerging reality of popular input (Turner, 1999: 138). The unspoken limits on political discussion – the ‘rules of the game’ – that Shils observed in contemporary British politics with such admiration in later works (e.g. Shils, 1955b) were for Shils the modern expression of a traditional, elite culture of civil politics. The country’s consensus-driven discourse excluded, notably, the totalizing worldviews that on the Continent had proven so destabilizing. British intellectuals were, for the most part, averse to Promethean ideals; they tended to accept, he observed, the limitations of politics, and they displayed a healthy attachment to their nation, its elites, and its traditions. The UK seemed to him a living riposte to the Schmittian gloom and cynicism about liberal democracy so common among German intellectuals fleeing the disastrous denouement of the Weimar experiment – a cynicism that he, too, had flirted with in the late 1930s.7 Shils’ appreciation for the UK’s achievement, which he saw essentially confirmed in the United States’ own English traditions, was amplified in the immediate post-war years. He was appointed reader in sociology at the

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London School of Economics (LSE) in 1946, where he deepened his exposure, in particular, to the intellectual defence of the self-stabilizing English political order that was part of the LSE-based critique of Mannheimian planning by fellow émigrés Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, and Michael Polanyi (Pooley, 2007). Shils’ sensitivity to order-maintaining liberal traditions was reinforced in his close friendship with Polanyi, in his LSE years and beyond. Shils’ foray into the post-war politics of nuclear technology at the University of Chicago – where he remained on a half-time basis – supplied for Shils, in the form of a living community of responsible scientist-intellectuals, a counter-ideal to the reckless, antinomian intellectual he had so long despised. In this post-war period, Shils became convinced that utopia-drunk intellectuals had contributed to the disastrous collapse of continental societies. He was especially put off by the persisting claims of intellectuals, many of them leftist émigrés traumatized by National Socialism and the Holocaust, that modern society – and by implicit and explicit extension, the United States and the UK – were plagued by dangerously suggestible and atomized masses who could, yet again, yield to totalitarian demagogues. This was, to some degree, his own fear in the years leading up to the war, but he had since come to recognize the more complex, Gemeinschaft-persisting integration of all modern social orders, as well as the particular defences built up by the liberal Anglo-American societies. To Shils, the complaints weren’t just wrong, but also dangerous. In his view, their dystopian tracts resulted from bitter, morning-after disappointment, rooted in a contrast with their impossibly utopian beliefs. The distance between intellectuals’ transcendent ideals and their actual, earthly societies, as Shils had observed all the way back to Flaubert, helps to explain their typical disgust for their own nations. In the lead-up to 1789, 1917, and 1933, the savage critiques of perfectionist intellectuals had in each case destabilized the social order; many of the same intellectuals had gone on, blinded by ideological zeal, to help bring about human catastrophe. Even in the ashes of these disastrous experiments, many intellectuals gave in to a homeless, roving idealism in search of new utopias, or else succumbed to an icy, disillusioned ‘realism’. Either way, the tendency among intellectuals has been to attack existing society and, in particular, exaggerate its faults. In the post-war years, many American and émigré intellectuals on the Left – after giving up, in light of the all-too-many Kronstadts up to and including the formation of the post-war Eastern bloc, their socialist convictions – became disappointed radicals of the ‘realist’ stripe. Despite and because of their renunciation, they remained embittered by transcendent



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contrast, and prone to find their earthly societies deficient. In practice, Shils observed, their inveterate griping tended to take the form in these years of what he would come to call the ‘theory of mass society’ – an overemphasis on the Gesellschaft-like character of modern life, an exaggeration of consumer-culture soullessness, an inflated fear of the ‘masses’’ susceptibility to demagogic propaganda (Shils [1957] 1972a; Shils, 1961b; Shils, 1962a). The picture put forward by these 1950s intellectuals was, he argued, a profoundly inaccurate displacement of their own disappointed ideals. The crux, for Shils, was that the fragile Anglo-American liberal order depends on faith in its civil traditions of politics – a faith that the embittered ex-leftists threaten to corrode. Even before he codified this view in the late 1950s in relation to his emergent categories of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, Shils came to regard these intellectuals’ grim critique of American society and culture as a potentially cancerous element in America’s plural politics. The risk, for Shils, was that the critics’ mistaken picture would end up a kind of tragic self-fulfilling prophecy – by poisoning the well of public sentiment that the precious Anglo-American liberal order drinks from, either directly or by producing nativist, anti-intellectual backlashes whipped up by spurned and opportunistic politicians. Shils made his point most forcefully back where he began: Georges Sorel. In Shils’ 1950 introduction to the Free Press reissue of Reflections on Violence, Sorel remains the exemplar of all-or-nothing moral purity, the view that a ‘total and drastic transformation of society’ would bring about a ‘total alleviation of life’s ills’ (Shils, 1950: 14). What Sorel so arrantly expressed is the ‘aura of fever and exaltation’ which surrounds the intellectual’s sense of political promise (1950: 15). Even if the moral zeal of Sorel’s socialism seemed by 1950 to be spent, the underlying rejectionism was everywhere: ‘The modern intelligentsia’, Shils wrote, ‘in all countries except Great Britain have, ever since the 18th century, been in various forms of opposition to the prevailing society and the authorities who rule it’ (1950: 16). The opposition derives, Shils claimed as he would in more elaborate terms a few years later, from a sense of alienation from its countrymen and leaders. Even without socialist commitments, the ‘apocalyptic outsider’s view of politics’ remains; indeed, in an ‘intellectually desiccated form’, the stance is more widespread than ‘ever before’ (Shils, 1950: 18). The same moral postulates drive, for example, the ‘fanatical anti-Communism of the exCommunists who, converted for a second time, trouble the world as much in one form as they did in the other, in all the insistence of the intelligentsia that goodness to be good must be perfection’ (1950: 19). This apocalyptic separatism – this ‘moral cleavage between the modern professional

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intellectual and primary institutions’ – is incompatible with a ‘free and orderly society’ (1950: 21, 18). To Shils, Sorel was like a magnifying glass, rendering visible the otherwise-hidden rot of post-war intellectual life. Shils’ manifesto In the first years after the war, Shils assumed the cocksure scientism and on-the-cusp bravado of other, less reflective social-science returnees. His Present State of American Sociology (1948) is a heady and brash book – almost a manifesto. When Shils wrote the text, he was still relatively unknown and unpublished, a lecturer without a Ph.D. or tenure. His breadth of knowledge, cutting prose style, and often severe assessments must have startled its disciplinary audience, as surely did the book’s sharply critical diagnosis. Shils’ argument is that American sociology remains in its pre-scientific infancy, despite some rich observations and promising research techniques. With nomothetic zeal, Shils exhorts his fellow sociologists to get on with the real science – general theory at a high level of abstraction. Sociology’s ‘present state’ is one of ‘backwardness’ – it remains in the ‘foothills of science’, and not yet at its heights (1948: 63). The next year Shils joined Talcott Parsons at Harvard for the Carnegie-sponsored theory seminars, yielding their co-edited paean to abstraction, Toward a General Theory of Action (1951). As Shils (2006a) explained in his posthumously published autobiography, ‘In the second half of the 1940s … I believed in the redemptive power of systematic theory’ (2006a: 81). Like so many others at the time, he had the impression that Minerva’s owl was set to take flight. Shils soon lost that faith: ‘I engaged in the work of system-building with enthusiasm but also with reservations. Professor Parsons had even more enthusiasm and no reservations. When it was all over, I began to become aware of the flaws in what we had done, which remains nonetheless a very impressive achievement … . It might well be possible to construct a coherent logical comprehensive system, with high explanatory power, in which more concrete concepts and hypotheses can be rigorously deduced from my general ones. However, after my experiences at the beginning of the 1950s, I have no temptation in that direction.’8 Around this time, and just after publishing the Sorel introduction (Shils, 1950), he turned his attention back to his original puzzle. By 1952 he had completed a first draft of a book-length treatise, Intellectuals, which he would continue to revise and expand into the early 1970s (when the manuscript surpassed 1,500 pages).9 The book was never published, though as late as 1982 Shils wrote that he ‘still hope[s] to come back to it, to reduce it and to release it from its present seclusion’ (Shils, 1982c: xxiii).



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It was during this post-Parsonsian hibernation that Shils adopted his omniscient, footnote-free prose-style – filling yellow notepads in greenink longhand. He became intimately involved in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and spent a year in India for a Ford Foundation project on the Subcontinent’s intellectuals. In both cases he was working on behalf of the Cold War national security state, providing – as it were – advice to princes. And he emerged with a fully-fledged theory of the intellectual: those persons with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred. Notes 1 In another memoir, Shils (1995a: 223) describes a more focused motivation: ‘I took it as my task to understand why Flaubert hated his country and his fellow countrymen as passionately as he did.’ 2 Though in a general way, Shils seems to have absorbed the broader philosophes– French-Revolution thesis, anticipated by Tocqueville and Burke. He made frequent passing reference to the argument. For example, in his important essay ‘Social Science as Public Opinion’ ([1977] 1980a), he argued that disgruntled American sociologists are the ‘contemporary equivalents of the philosophes of eighteenth-century France’. 3 See, for example, ‘There is undoubtedly much truth in these writers, but they only saw a part and claimed to speak for the whole’ (Shils, 1950: 19). 4 Shils: ‘It helped to define a standpoint from which the fellow-traveling and the communist intellectuals of the 1930s were to be criticized’ (1972c: vii). 5 In a mid-1930s letter to his friend Torsten Gordland, Shils wrote: ‘In the larger world, things are positivity sickening. Only the most fanatical or the most resolute and purposeful persons can get any satisfaction from the way things are turning these days—the former out of vested interest in a theory and the latter out of moral uprightness and devotion, neither of which virtue I can muster to any significant degree. I am almost being reduced to an intellectually obviously ridiculous & fantastic wish for Heillösungen. And the truth is, dear Torsten, there is not a damned bit of relief anywhere—not one damned bit—person or super-personal.’ Letter to Torsten Gordland (20 September 1935). Edward Shils Papers. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, folder Correspondence 1930s, Box 1, Series III. 6 Shils singled out John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) (Shils, 1975e: xiii) and Maurice Cowling (Shils, 1985: 175). 7 Shils’ reflections on the British tradition of civility were not elaborated in published form in his wartime and post-war LSE period (1946–50), but were instead germinating in observation and close historical reading. His first sustained treatment of British and American pluralism came a few years later, in his remarkable, public intellectual denunciation of McCarthyism, The Torment of Secrecy (1956). Earlier expressions include Shils 1954a, 1954c, 1955c. 8 Shils (2006a: 85).

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9 It is astonishing to realize that the Intellectuals manuscript was one of four lengthy, never-published projects Shils drafted in the early to mid-1950s: a ‘full draft’ of Consensus and Liberty: The Social Psychological Foundations of Political Democracy; a rougher draft of a book on primary groups; and ‘an almost wholly new manuscript’, a year or two later, on Love, Belief, and Civility (Shils, 1975e: xxviii).

10

Edward Shils and his Portraits Bryan S. Turner

Like most people, I am constitutionally contradictory. As a student I heard Victor Gollancz give a lecture that began, ‘I am a vegetarian and I eat meat every day.’ That’s also my problem – systemic contradiction. On the one hand, it strikes me as essential, if we are to understand an author and their works, to place them in their social and historical setting. The implication is that where and when you are born determines the brilliance of the particular author. Without the context, can we ever understand the author? Edward Shils was very much a product of the University of Chicago in its heyday, but also of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics (LSE), where he was a reader in sociology (1946–50). On the other hand, I believe that great works stand the test of time, and they are not wholly context-specific. They speak out of context and anticipate future developments that are not anticipated in situ. For example, I can read Aristotle’s account of citizenship from the Politics as if I were reading an article in the recent issue of Political Theory. Thus the author stands above the context and is immune to the contingencies of location. Now Edward Shils was a uniquely clever man with extremely broad interests in sociology, the legacy of Max Weber, the role of intellectuals in society, the importance of tradition, and the problems of nuclear power. One imagines that Shils would have been impressive in any context. I don’t pretend to know the answer to this puzzle – context or individual brilliance? The boring answer is that both context and person are important. In any case, I like conceptual conundrums, by which I mean interesting questions that have no satisfactory answer. Thus it is with Shils’ Portraits: A Gallery of Intellectuals (1997g). The portraits are sparkling accounts of a collection of influential academics and intellectuals. However, to appreciate them, we don’t necessarily need all the details about context; the scholarship emerging from this network of scholars has been remarkably resilient in standing the test of time. Let us take one example from a figure who played a large role in Shils’ early career at Chicago, namely Frank H. Knight. A founder of the neoclassical school of economics,

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Knight translated and published Weber’s General Economic History ([1923] 1927), which was a collection of lecture notes (Wirtschaftsgeschichte) that had been assembled by Weber’s students in 1923. This volume is important because it departs significantly from the religious framework of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930) by placing emphasis on the State and dependable law. The importance of Knight’s approach to Weber was subsequently ‘rediscovered’ by Randall Collins, Daniel Chirot, and Douglas North. This intellectual context in Chicago was also the setting for Shils’ translation of Weber’s methodological essays. I dwell somewhat on this example because the three principal influences on Shils (at least in his formative years) were Knight, Weber, and Robert E. Park. From 1914 to 1933, Park played a leading role in the development of the ‘Chicago School of Sociology’. Park had been with Georg Simmel in Berlin, took his Ph.D. from Heidelberg, and eventually joined Chicago as a lecturer in 1914. Knight and Park are the two professors who receive the most attention in Shils’ introductory chapter (‘A Gallery of Intellectuals’) as individuals who cemented Shils’ introduction to sociology. With these sketches, Shils painted a positive picture of academic life before the Second World War. In his maturity Shils became increasingly disillusioned with intellectuals and academics, especially those who embraced ideas and theories at no personal risk or cost. I return to this sense of disillusion with academic life at the conclusion to this account of Portraits. In many respects these vignettes offer a captivating historical insight into the University of Chicago during the period of its rise to ascendancy. These Portraits should be read by every student as a general, if eccentric, history of social theory in the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time they tell us, in some respects, more about Shils than about his subjects. On the one hand it is a set of detailed reflections on the history of the Committee for Social Thought at Chicago, where Shils was a Distinguished Service Professor serving on the Committee for forty-five years. On the other it is a general history of social science, especially sociology in the same period. To grasp his work on tradition and the sacred, or his editorship of Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy, we need some understanding of the conditions that gave rise to these nostalgic reflections on the University of Chicago, and the many famous people attached to that university in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as to Peterhouse, where Shils was an honorary fellow, and to the LSE. More broadly, the Portraits document the history of the university as a research institution in the West over one hundred years. I suggest that the hidden theme of the Portraits is not just an account of the rise of particular universities but a reflection on the decline of the university as



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an autonomous community of scholars and the rise of the modern university as a bureaucratic corporation. It is simultaneously an account of the decline of a book culture that had dominated the West since the origins of printing. With the erosion of this classical book culture, there was simultaneously the decline of ‘bookish’ scholars. My favourite example from the Portraits is Arnaldo Dante Momigliano (1908–87). Momigliano was a Jew who was forced out of his university position in Turin by the Racial Laws introduced by the Fascist regime in 1938. He was for some time at Oxford University and University College London, but he was later attached to the University of Chicago as the Alexander White Professor in the Humanities. His knowledge of the ancient world was immense. One work in particular has played an important role in recent research on the origins of the ‘axial religions’ of the ancient world (800–200 bce), namely Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (1975). In his notion of the axial age as an ‘age of criticism’, he played an important part in the emergence of the axial-age debate that has been taken up by Robert Bellah, Hans Joas, and others. Joseph Epstein, in his introduction (‘My Friend Edward’), claims rightly that Momigliano was Shils’ ‘only peer’ (Epstein, 1997: 19). Momigliano was an important figure in Shils’ own intellectual career. My attachment to Portraits is intellectual, but also nostalgic for the world of cosmopolitan intellectuals and the life of books long before disciplinary specialization threatened to kill off the institutions that were inhabited by Shils and formed the subjects of his Portraits. For Shils, Momigliano was a close friend, but also a benchmark to contrast genuine from fraudulent scholarship. He thus has a large presence in the Portraits where, for example, Shils reports that Momigliano had a special regard for Weber’s sociology if for no other reason that it ‘offered a large perspective’ on society and history, and that ‘Weber was one of the few scholars who understood that religion was the foundation of society’ (1997g: 229–30). His demise in 1987 represents the end of an era of Western scholarship. I have been reading Shils’ work through most of my academic life. I assume I first came across him through his translations of Max Weber’s essays on methodology. Weber’s scattered articles on ‘methodology’ are more about the philosophy of social science than about ‘methods’ as we would now understand them. In these essays by Weber we find a rich vocabulary that continues to shape modern-day sociology – value neutrality, value relevance, interpretive sociology, and the ideal type. In this field Shils’ translation remains a key reference. Given my interest in the sociology of religion, I was also drawn to Shils’ work on tradition and the sacred (Shils, 1981a). I came to the Portraits much later. My signature on the flyleaf of my copy reminds me I bought the volume as late as 2011 in New

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York. By that time I had had professorships at the University of Cambridge and the City University of New York, and I had also been the Morris Ginsberg Fellow at the LSE in 1981. I was therefore drawn to Shils for the reason that he was also a transatlantic academic. He had been at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and at the LSE while holding a professorship at Chicago. Shils was thus one of the few American academics to bridge the gap between European and American sociology. Perhaps the other example that comes to mind is Peter L. Berger who, with Thomas Luckmann, brought a European perspective on the sociology of knowledge from Karl Mannheim, deploying the idea of social construction to the study of society (1966). Berger and Luckmann made important contributions to the sociology of religion which, as I explain later, was largely missing from Shils’ academic interests, despite his life-long interest in Weber. Here is another contradiction. Shils loved America or, as Joseph Epstein has it, ‘I bring up Edward’s love of America because he did not seem particularly American—in fact he once told me, he had deliberately set out to make himself European’ (Epstein, 1997: 5). In terms of mannerisms – nobody could call him Ed – he was perhaps more English than European. Here, then, are more contradictions. He engaged with some of the most technically complex modern scientific ideas and policy debates such as nuclear disarmament, edited Minerva, and dissected the weighty problems of secrecy and academic accountability, yet he wrote passionately about the creative importance of tradition in societies, including modern societies. His lifestyle was conservative, and it is perhaps fitting that he was a fellow at Peterhouse, which was not just the oldest college but also the most Anglican, arcane, and exclusive of the colleges. Yet Shils was deeply involved in the study of contemporary society and politics, as evidenced by his book on populism, politics, and secrecy (Shils, 1956). While Shils spent a lot of time in England and India, he was obviously deeply involved in Chicago. One cannot start this assessment therefore without some discussion of Robert Maynard Hutchins (Shils, 1997g: chapter 5) and the early history of social science at Chicago. The Chicago School was one of the most influential centres of sociological research in North America and its influence was felt well beyond it. The University was founded in 1890 with a commitment to research, graduate training, and service to the city of Chicago. The Chicago School of Sociology emerged around 1915. At the time, the emerging social sciences had close connections with reformism, local philanthropy such as the Settlement movement, and Hull House, which was associated with Jane Addams (Villadsen and Turner, 2016). There was, however, a longstanding tension around social work, social reform, and scientific sociology. The quest for science eventually broke the School’s roots with philanthropy, the



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Settlement movement, and with ‘Christian sociology’ (Turner and Turner, 1990). There were, in addition, conflicts emerging around the political commitments of faculty and the conservative values and interests of the University’s leadership and management. In the Bemis affair of the 1890s, Edward Bemis was fired in response to his public criticisms of the corruption of the railways and legislatures during the Pullman strike. Chicago University President William R. Harper was constrained by these railway interests and the dependence of the University on business elites. Subsequently, Albion Small had to guarantee that his references for sociology students rejected any suggestion that they were socialists or troublemakers (Turner, 2014: 12). The rise of professionalism in the discipline was indicated by the creation of the American Sociological Association in 1905 and by a growing emphasis on empirical and quantitative research methods. In the first instance these research methods were based on the social surveys undertaken by British urban reformers like Charles Booth. The research emphasis and the reform agenda were on poverty, urban slums, deviance, and crime. Over time the Chicago School included many of the founding fathers of American sociology: W. I. Thomas, Florian Znaniecki, Robert E. Park, and Ernest Burgess. Although women sociologists had played an important role in the philanthropic and reform orientation of early Chicago research, they were in reality not members as the Chicago School of Sociology which came eventually to adopt a more scientific and less applied approach. So let me return to the theme of contradiction and write these observations on Shils’ world in terms of a series of paradoxes. I am struck by the aphorism ‘A man is known by the company he keeps.’ Consequently we might be equally interested in who is left out. The Portraits describe some of the most brilliant intellectuals of their time. Shils had entered Chicago on 22 September 1932 and his connection with the University spanned some sixty-five years. In the introductory Gallery we encounter Knight and Park, but also John U. Nef – the author of The Rise of the British Coal Industry (1932) – who appears briefly, but also has the benefit of a separate portrait (Shils, 1997g: chapter 10). There are many casual references throughout to people who do not appear in the Gallery, such as John Sparrow, the Warden of All Souls College Oxford, to Leszek Kolakowski, who wrote the definitive three-volume history of Marxism, and to Wolfgang Mommsen, the great philosopher of Max Weber’s political sociology. There are people who occupy a large space in the Portraits, such as the famous historian of religions in the ancient world, Arnaldo Momigliano. Then there is Harold D. Lasswell, the theorist of modern communication systems. I shall return to this issue later, but Shils is rarely critical of the

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people he has chosen to write about. There are a limited number of exceptions – Lasswell being one of them. Referring to Lasswell’s synthesis of Marx and Freud, he says, ‘I liked neither the intellectual result nor the moral overtones of the synthesis … Lasswell was not gifted with the capacity of continuous, logically coherent exposition’ (Shils, 1997g: 50). We meet no women in the Portraits. However, Shils had edited Cambridge Women (Shils and Blacker, eds, 1996), which was a collection of portraits of women who had been influential at Cambridge before women were allowed into colleges as fellows. I refer to this absence not as a criticism of Shils but simply to recognize that higher education during much of Shils’ lifetime did not generally speaking include women. In this sense Shils was indeed a man of his time and place. This was true on both sides of the Atlantic and especially of Cambridge colleges such as Peterhouse. However, towards the end of his life in 1995, women had begun to play a far more prominent or at least visible role in universities. For example, Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, which was created to cater to female students, was founded in 1965. Debates about how to better to promote women at Cambridge colleges goes back to the 1950s, when a group of women (known informally as the Dining Group) organized themselves to provide support for female academics who were not permitted to become college fellows. One gathers that in many respects Shils was by force of habit a private person, and we learn relatively little about his family connections, despite the fact that he was married twice. Epstein tells us that Shils ‘hungered, too, for a richer family life than he had’ (1997: 27), but the fact is that his lifestyle was that of a bachelor. Having noted the absence of women, the people he includes need no justification for their presence. Many people who could have enjoyed a separate portrait are discussed in his introduction (‘A Gallery of Academics, mainly in Chicago’). So who is obviously missing? There is a long list of people who appear briefly but without an actual Portrait, and they have all played an important role in the social sciences, such as the anthropologist Robert Redfield, and Louis Wirth. One major omission is Talcott Parsons, with whom Shils co-edited The General Theory of Action (1951). Albeit an edited work, at the time it was a general summary of Parsons’ approach to any theory of action. By any standard this publication is one of the most impenetrable books of modern sociology. Parsons may also have failed to enter the Portraits because he was attached to Harvard University, not Chicago. But Parsons and Shils also had in common the LSE. Parsons and Shils might at first sight look like improbable co-authors. Shils’ prose is invariable elegant, witty, and economic. Parsons’ prose, at least with and after the publication of The Social System (1951), is



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impenetrable. Parsons’s systems theory and abstract functionalism have been the targets of much criticism, but these criticisms often overlook Parsons’s essays on pre-war Germany, the age structure, family and kinship, and medical practice. Shils offers an important appreciation of Parsons’s work in this regard, noting that ‘these were excellent essays and sociological in the best sense, but the extent to which they were guided by, or subsumed under, explicit and abstract theoretical ideas was rather slight’ (Shils, 1997g: 46). Obviously Shils’ affection of Parsons ran deep. He was, for Shils, ‘one of the humblest and least vain of men of genuine intellectual accomplishments’ (Shils, 1997g: 47). What, then, did they have in common from an intellectual point of view? One answer is, of course, Max Weber. Parsons had translated The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 1930) and Shils had translated The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Weber, 1949). But here is another contradiction to which I shall return. Both men could be described as Europeanists in intellectual terms. In The Structure of Social Action Parsons had brought Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Vilfredo Pareto to the core of social theory, thereby breaking with the legacy of early American sociology which rested far more on the pragmatism of William James, G. H. Mead, and Robert E. Park. The Europeans – the majority in Portraits – include Raymond Aron, Leopold Labedz, Harold Laski, Karl Mannheim, Arnaldo Momigliano, John U. Nef, and Leo Szilard. The selection of subjects once more reflects Shils’ European orientation to social theory. The other major absence is Saul Bellow, who was born as Solomon Bellows (1915–2005) into a Lithuanian-Jewish family. While as a young man he rebelled against his religious background, he wrote an engaging and committed account of Israel, including its religious figures, in To Jerusalem and Back (1976). Bellow was a novelist, journalist, and public intellectual whose literary influence has been enormous. He was in many respects the leading literary figure of his generation, receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1976), the Nobel Prize for Literature (1976), and the National Medal of Arts (1988). He won the National Book Award on three separate occasions (1954, 1965, and 1971). Growing up in a slum in Quebec, Bellow sought transcendence through a heroic quest for learning. Shils appears as the major figure in various novels such as Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1969) (as Artur Sammler), in Humboldt’s Gift (1973) (as Professor Durnwald), and in Ravelstein (2000) (as Rakhmiel Kogon). Bellow’s technique was to base his fictional characters on actual people, and the character of Ravelstein is based on Allan Bloom, who was also at Chicago. While Sammler and Durnwald are sympathetically and warmly presented, the Shils figure in Ravelstein is a negative character who is treated with

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considerable animosity. By then Bellow was 85 years of age, and they had been close friends. Bellow also served on the Committee for Social Thought, which he joined in 1962, and was mentored by Shils. Epstein’s introduction to the Portraits starts in 1973, when Bellow invited him to dinner with Shils at a Korean restaurant on Clark Street, Chicago. As the friendship between Bellow and Shils declined, that between Epstein and Shils increased. Ravelstein thus marks the nadir of their falling-out. There are some missing names that one desperately wants to hear more about, especially Leo Strauss (1899–1973). There is one reference to Strauss in the portrait of Robert Hutchins, who had become President of the University in 1929, where Shils describes Strauss as a lover of ‘great books’ in political philosophy (Shils, 1997g: 137). This observation is a striking understatement. Strauss was born in Germany to Jewish parents and spent most of his life as a professor at the University of Chicago from 1949 onwards. He became internationally famous for his textual reading of Plato and Aristotle, tracing their influence through Islamic and Jewish philosophy. Strauss shared Shils’ interest in Weber’s sociology, but Strauss was a major critic of Weber’s epistemology in his Natural Right and History (Strauss, 1953), in which he defends the idea of an empirically valid distinction between right and wrong in ethics and politics. Whereas Shils’ sociology did not have any obvious impact on American politics, Strauss has been hugely if controversially influential, giving rise to a whole debate about Straussianism. The term refers to his influence, especially over conservative political figures and ideas, in rejecting the notion that modern ideas represent some form of progress over the past. But Strauss also implicitly favoured elitism, because the meaning of great books was not transparent and often required deep research into their hidden significance. What is the responsibility of the act of interpretation of the secret message of a text such as Maimonides’s Guide? (Strauss, 1952). Hence reading texts may not lend itself automatically to democratic culture. It is perhaps unsurprising that many of the figures in Portrait, including Shils himself, were from a Jewish and European background. Indeed some eight of the ten portraits have European-Jewish ancestry – Aron (French Jew), Hook (Austrian Jew), Labedz (Polish Jew), Laski (Manchester Jew, but with parents originally from Poland), Mannheim (Hungarian Jew), Momigliani (Italian Jew), and Szilard (Hungarian Jew). These men largely came from immigrant Jewish families escaping Nazi persecution and more generally from European anti-Semitism. They had often come from high bourgeois families, although in the United States they were frequently raised in slums. Of course it was not just the University of Chicago that benefited from this Jewish cohort. The New School in New York had a similar intake, with



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Hannah Arendt being a notable example. Although with Jewish backgrounds, the subjects of the Portraits are secular. Despite this overwhelming influence, Shils makes no comment on this legacy of secular Jewish culture. Shils was a secular Jew who took religion seriously. He spoke Yiddish, and Epstein comments, ‘Edward honoured his Jewishness without observing it’ (1997: 4). According to Epstein (1997: 27), he liked the idea of Christmas, ‘though he didn’t do much about it’. Yet as I have already noted, two major figures in his intellectual development and in his life, Weber and Momigliano, took religion extremely seriously, but religion plays little or no role in the Portraits. His subjects were essentially secular humanists. Once more Laski comes in for sharp criticism – ‘he was religiously atonal and blind. Had he been a little less so, he might have avoided the assertion made in at least one of his later writings that socialism was a replacement of Christianity’ (Shils, 1997g: 187). In his work on tradition, Shils covers a range of institutions and practices, but rarely considers secularization in relation to tradition. Generally his Portraits are sympathetic and perhaps one could say ‘caring’ towards his subjects. He rarely takes up a critical assessment of them. The main exceptions are Isaiah Berlin, who was ‘merely charming’ rather than great (Epstein, 1997:10), and the other is Harold Laski. About Laski, he had almost nothing positive to say. I take two examples more or less at random. Thus ‘Laski was intellectually incapable of appreciating primordial things such as ethnicity and nationality and patriotism’ (Shils, 1997g: 186). One would imagine this ‘inability’ to be fatal in the social sciences. Furthermore, ‘Along with being an impressive fabricator, he was also a great snob’ (Shils, 1997g: 195). As evidence that Shils could be a severe critic, one might take his amusing typology of authors and their work which is recalled by Epstein (1997: 24). The intellectual possibilities are unoriginal but wrong; right but unoriginal; original and right; and original but wrong. Most authors are both unoriginal and wrong. The other critical Portrait is that of Robert Maynard Hutchins (1997g: chapter 5). Hutchins (1899–1977) became President of the University of Chicago (1929–45), and subsequently, Chancellor (1945–51).We can gain some idea of the importance of Hutchins for Shils in the fact that while the majority of Portraits occupy less than 20 pages, Hutchins gets 30 pages. Hutchins was a controversial figure whose plans to reform the University met with much opposition from established professors. These included the elimination of varsity football, and the creation of an undergraduate College of the University of Chicago, which was based on a pedagogical principle of reading ‘great books’. The ‘great books’ became the intellectual foundation of the Committee for Social Thought, and Shils recognized this development as an important part of the Hutchins legacy – ‘The

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Committee was also close to the Hutchins position in the sense which it laid on the intensive study of works of major importance. … It should also be said that the Committee on Social Thought would never have existed without Hutchins’ (Shils, 1997g: 137). Hutchins was sceptical about the value of empirical social science research, which he thought could not solve major social problems such as the Great Depression. Indeed, ‘Hutchins took no interest in sociology which was at the height of its fame when he came to the University, though he undoubtedly did not like it’ (Shils, 1997g: 138). But he did not like the physical and biological sciences either. Instead, with support from Mortimer Adler, he promoted Aristotelianism and Thomism as providing a philosophical framework for the analysis of American society. This approach was vigorously opposed by people like Lewis Wirth and Frank H. Knight. Hutchinson was also accused of converting the University into a Catholic stronghold. Shils holds Hutchins responsible for the decline of the University under his leadership. The Chicago business elite did not approve of Hutchins’s ideas and university finances declined sharply as a result. Before the Second World War Chicago was on the same level as Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley. As Chicago declined, Harvard became richer and more influential. Hyde Park, the area around the University, also went into decline. Shils admits that Hutchins may have been unable to prevent this urban decay: ‘But I had the distinct impression that he was indifferent to it’ (Shils, 1997g: 151). Even more problematic for Shils was that Hutchins had ‘no patience for the principles which lie unarticulated and embodied on the traditions of institutions and individual experience’ (Shils, 1997g: 154). Hutchins was a great man but presided over a failing institution – ‘This is how the career of this glittering, entirely extraordinary man appears to me and that is why I am so sad in contemplating it’ (Shils, 1997g: 154). Shils became pessimistic about academics in his mature years. He became depressed by university life and by the cowardly behaviour of many academics. The majority of people who appear as Portraits are best described as ‘bookish’. Shils quotes Leo Szilard as declaring that ‘the age of books had passed’ (Shils, 1997g: 254). The educational philosophy of the University of Chicago under Hutchins was based on the importance of a deep understanding and love of ‘great books’. Leo Strauss’s deep textual reading of the classics was part of this tradition. Allan Bloom issued his influential criticism of the decline of this book culture in his The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Its basic message was that the great books of Western culture have been devalued in the modern university, and that in many respects academics who promoted fashionable ideas about



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‘deconstruction’ and postmodernism are to blame for robbing students of this vital heritage. These portraits, then, are fundamentally nostalgic for a world that has indeed disappeared. Nostalgia in this case is an important critical tool of reflection. We live in the world of e-books where the President of the United States conducts much of his external relationships via Tweets. The Committee for the Study of Social Thought and the survey programmes on ‘great books’ are a measure of an intellectual world that has disappeared. Ironically, the transformation of the academic community into a corporate bureaucracy can be deduced from Weber’s ideas – in many respects the dominant figure in Portraits – about the rationalization of the modern world and its disenchantment. Thus the dominant closing mood of Portraits is one of sadness for a lost world.

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Edward Shils: defender of the traditional university Philip G. Altbach Edward Shils was a creature of the university – spending most of his life in the groves of academe from the time he obtained his bachelor’s degree in European languages and literature in 1931 at the University of Pennsylvania until he died in 1995. He left academic life only for a few years of wartime service during the Second World War (MacLeod, 2016). Higher education, and especially the research university, was an abiding interest and concern for his entire career – and a topic to which he dedicated extensive study, especially in the latter part of his life. His first article on higher education was published in 1938 and concerned the limits on freedom of research and teaching in the social sciences (Shils, 1938). That article – along with many of his other works – remains relevant in the twenty-first century. Not only did he establish a serious scholarly journal focusing on higher education and science policy – Minerva – in 1962, but he wrote well over one hundred articles, reports, and commentaries concerning all aspects of higher education over the years. Many of these contributions appeared in the pages of Minerva, but others were published in a wide range of publications. While Shils did not bring together his work on higher education or write an overarching book on the topic, two volumes of his work, prepared by others, were published following his death (Shils, 1997b, 1997c). Shils believed in the Humboldtian-model research university as a central intellectual institution. Important for teaching, research, and the broader intellectual life of society, universities require autonomy and must be respected as institutions that somehow stand aside from the day-to-day controversies of contemporary society. Shils focuses on this complicated set of relationships in ‘The Academic Ethic’ ([1982] 1997c). We might also call Edward Shils the quintessential ‘transatlantic man’. From the mid-1940s until the end of his life, he held academic appointments in the United States and the UK simultaneously (Epstein, 1995). From 1933, he had a series of appointments at the University of Chicago, his main academic home for more than sixty years, and from 1946 he held



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appointments at several British universities, starting at the London School of Economics (LSE) and moving in the 1960s to the University of Cambridge, first to King’s College and later to Peterhouse. He was a keen observer of academic developments on both sides of the Atlantic, and played a significant role in university affairs in both countries (Altbach, 1997). He was instrumental in the development of sociology as a field of study in the UK (Eisenstadt, 1997; Halsey, 1999), and a commentator on higher-education issues in that context. Shils was similarly active at the University of Chicago. He was a key player in developing the famous social science sequence in the College at the University of Chicago, and was later part of the Committee on Social Thought, the pioneering interdisciplinary programme that offered doctoral degrees. Both of these efforts reflect Shils’ multidisciplinary interests and skills. During the turbulent 1960s, Shils was involved in the University of Chicago’s responses to student activism and other challenges. During the presidency of Edward Levi, a law professor and later US Attorney-General, Shils was quite influential, and some said that the university was ruled by ‘The Two Edwards’ (Epstein, 1995). Both Shils and Levi were quite critical of disruptive activism, and Chicago took a hard line when students disrupted university activities. Students who took over offices were disciplined or expelled. Thus, while Edward Shils never held a senior leadership position in a university, he was involved not only in curriculum development and interdisciplinary teaching, but also in crisis management during crucial times at the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago was the perfect institutional home for Edward Shils. The university has traditionally upheld the highest intellectual standards, while providing the opportunity for innovative and interdisciplinary work. Especially during the presidency of Robert M. Hutchins (who hired Shils and was supportive of him), Chicago was well known for its innovative approach to higher education. At the same time, Chicago remained very much a university in the German tradition. Founded in 1892 on the model of the German research university, the University of Chicago was an institution dominated by its senior faculty, and by the ideals of research and scholarship. Edward Shils was, in many ways, a prototypical Chicago professor – learned, committed to high standards of scholarship, and interested in ideas on education as well as the disciplines in general. It is worth noting that Edward Shils’ writings and research reflect his major concern with the elite sectors of higher education. He was fiercely committed to meritocracy in all aspects of higher education – in the hiring and promotion of faculty and the admission of students (Shils, [1970] 1997c). Indeed, he did not mind the word elitist when it came to define the highest standards of academe.

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the calling of social thought The mid-twentieth-century context

Edward Shils was writing about universities during a period of significant change – the half-century following the end of the Second World War. This was a time of both turmoil for higher education and unprecedented expansion, both in terms of student numbers (starting in the United States) and the role of the university as a centre of research. It was also the period of the Cold War, the anti-Communist crusade of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and in the 1960s the massive student activist movements in opposition to the war in Vietnam, in favour of civil rights, and other issues in the United States and in Europe. All of these issues greatly affected universities worldwide – and all were of concern to Shils. As one of the founders of the influential Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a magazine based at the University of Chicago and one of the first publications to highlight the dangers of nuclear war and call for controls over nuclear weapons and greater public understanding of nuclear issues generally, Shils was embedded in the cultural and political ferment of the time. In 1956, at the height of McCarthyism, Shils published The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies (1956). While not directly concerned with higher education, this influential book focused on issues related to scientific freedom and had direct relevance to higher education. While American higher education started to expand in the early years of the twentieth century, its period of massive growth started after the Second World War and intensified in the 1960s – creating the first mass system in the world. Student enrolments expanded from fewer than four million to more than twelve million. The student population changed significantly as well, with students from racial and ethnic minorities enrolling in large numbers, and the proportion of women reaching half of the total. Further, funding for research dramatically increased during the post-war years, in considerable part because of the Cold War. As Clark Kerr noted, the American multiversities took hold during this period – large public universities with significant funding that were devoted to both research and teaching (Kerr, 1962). At the same time, the private research universities gained strength through increases in their endowments and greater access to government research funds. Following the example of California, most American states developed public highereducation systems, with different kinds of colleges and universities serving the diverse needs of rapidly expanding enrolments (Geiger, 1993; Cole, 2009). Shils’ work is, of course, situated in a particular time and space, and must be understood in this context. His work on higher education was



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written during a rather unique period in the development of American higher education – the period of great expansion beginning in the 1950s and extending through the 1970s, and the following period of consolidation. This was a watershed phase of American higher education, and Shils provided a consistent perspective on the academic developments of the time. The period was marked not only by expansion in student numbers, but also the growth of public higher education (public institutions enrolled less than fifty per cent of the student population at the beginning and eighty per cent at the end), and a dramatic expansion and accompanying diversification of the academic profession. The American university assumed world leadership in science and scholarship during this period, with Europe’s pre-eminent role fading. Research funds increased dramatically, with the federal government providing significant support for basic research; the top one hundred American universities benefited most particularly from this investment. The culture of research came to dominate these top institutions as never before. English became the dominant language of world science, and more than half of the world’s research and development expenditures took place in the United States. By the mid-1970s, the academic boom was coming to an end, and a decade later American higher education was facing significant financial problems. Nonetheless, American academic leadership remained powerful, in part because of the size of the American academic system and the fact that American higher education faced the challenges of expansion, diversified populations, and integrating research, teaching, and service to society earlier than most other countries. At the same time that the American academic system expanded, it faced a number of significant challenges – issues with which Shils concerned himself, and which were reflected in the pages of Minerva during this period. Because government was providing an increasing proportion of money for higher education, in terms of research funds as well as grants, loans, and other programmes to assist student access, there were increasing calls for accountability. Government regulation in many aspects of higher education grew dramatically. Shils consistently argued that universities had to be autonomous to be successful. He was a strong voice for government support of higher education, as well as advocating for significant autonomy of the sector. This proved to be a minority position, as academic leaders proved willing to accept considerable accountability measures in order to obtain funds. Perhaps influenced by the pre-Thatcher British arrangement through which governmental funds were allocated by the University Grants Committee, which was a buffer between the universities and the government, Shils continued to argue for autonomy.

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An extension of this commitment to autonomy was Shils’ strong belief in academic meritocracy, and in judgement by peers. This increasingly placed him in opposition to affirmative action and other programmes aimed at increasing access of specific population groups to higher education at all levels. As such programmes became more entrenched in American higher education, he found himself increasingly isolated on the Right. He opposed affirmative action as inappropriate governmental interference in the business of academic institutions, and he felt that it interfered with the natural meritocracy of academe as well. The 1960s brought unprecedented turmoil to universities around the world; Shils was both an unsparing critic of radical students and a defender of the traditional values of the universities (Shils, 1969b). Student activist movements demanded that universities include students and other stakeholders in decision making and university governance. As a consequence, many academic institutions reformed governance arrangements accordingly. A number of German universities were reformed so that students as well as other university employees achieved significant power in decisionmaking. Similar reforms took place in other continental European countries. Unsurprisingly, Shils opposed these reforms, and defended traditional patterns of faculty control over the universities. In summary, much of Shils’ writing about higher education occurred during periods of great change in modern higher education. He was part of the enormous expansion of American higher education from the end of the Second World War to the end of the twentieth century. He also participated in what might be called the modernization of British higher education in the years following the war. While massification came much later to the UK – starting in the 1960s – higher education became less insular and more receptive to new ideas. Indeed, Shils’ role in the development of sociology as an accepted discipline in the UK is an example of broader trends (Bulmer, 1996). The fundamental nature of the university Edward Shils was profoundly influenced by the German sociologist Max Weber, whose work on higher education he translated from German to English for publication early in his career. Weber’s perspectives on higher education were influential – again bringing a German perspective to Shils’ thinking (Shils, 1973). Weber points out, among other things, that the emergence of an independent academic profession in imperial Germany helped to set the stage for the ascendancy of the research university. While what is now referred to as the ‘corporatization’ of universities and the infusion of ‘managerialism’ into university administration was in its



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early stages during Shils’ professional life, he would have been highly sceptical about these developments, while at same time understanding that universities have become large and complex organizations that require efficient and professional management. Shils, for example, did not comment on the traditional German university organizational pattern that divided management from governance through the appointment of senior civil servants to handle the administrative and financial details of the institution, while guaranteeing that faculty members controlled all of the academic decisions. He firmly believed in university autonomy and that university professors, especially senior staff, should control the basic governance of academic institutions (Shils, 1992). He saw this as the fundamental idea of the Humboldtian university. However, Shils did not see the university as an ivory tower – he accepted that universities, and particularly research universities, needed to be engaged with society and played a key role in creating and transmitting knowledge. At the same time, he was not in favour of academic institutions being directly involved in societal or political affairs (Shils, 1967). Universities, as institutions, needed to maintain their neutrality at the same time that their faculty members and researchers were engaged both in research of use to society and cultural and political discourse. His participation in establishing and working with the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists – established at the University of Chicago in 1945, mainly by scientists and engineers who had been in involved in the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb – brought a social-science perspective to the magazine, which in its early years was an influential voice concerning scientific affairs relating to nuclear issues of all kinds. Lastly, it is important to note that while he was a defender of the traditional university, Shils was committed to interdisciplinary teaching and the curriculum at a time when such developments were quite unusual. The University of Chicago, with its interdisciplinary core curriculum, was a pioneer in this area. In the twenty-first century, a heightened emphasis on interdisciplinary theory and learning practices is de rigueur at American research institutions, and Shils also was ahead of his time in this respect. Minerva Edward Shils launched Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy in 1962 and edited it for 33 years. As Roy MacLeod wrote, ‘He was the journal, and until his death in 1995, the journal was his, reflecting his vigour, passion, prejudices, and forebodings’ (MacLeod, 2016: 257). Minerva, while a scholarly journal in the best European definition of that term, was not a typical academic journal. It was not, in the traditional

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sense, peer reviewed – Edward Shils was in many cases the single arbiter of the acceptability of an article – and he was famous for his heavy editing and editorial guidance (Epstein, 1995). Some referred to him as a benevolent dictator – others were less generous. There is no doubt, however, that Minerva was a pioneering publication – perhaps the first interdisciplinary journal focusing on the nexus of higher education, science policy, and research. When it was established, there were few journals examining higher education, and even fewer looking at the policy implications of research and science. Minerva was also unique in that it took an international perspective from the beginning, recognizing both that higher education was increasingly an international phenomenon with implications worldwide. Shils understood intrinsically that academic developments in countries which at the time were little understood or discussed in the West, such as India, deserved attention and analysis. Minerva was, and remains, mainly a scholarly journal, publishing research-based articles. It was, however, unique in also publishing articles focusing on news about higher education and science developments that Edward Shils felt important. These articles were mostly written by Shils himself, and were often many pages in length, discussing events and trends. Articles on such topics as higher education reforms in India and elsewhere, academic freedom issues, repression of universities, student activism and its implications, and many others were featured. In addition, Minerva published reports issued by commissions, universities, and other agencies dealing with higher-education and science issues. Shils himself also wrote long reports on academic developments around the world that he thought important. In a period prior to the Internet, these articles and reports provided access to information unavailable elsewhere. History Several long essays concerning the history of modern universities illustrate Shils’ view concerning the importance of the evolution of universities in the twentieth century from the Humboldtian German research university model of the early 1800s (Shils, [1997h] 1978; 1997b). His key concern in these works is to trace the logic of the development of institutions during what he considered the formative period of the modern research university. Among other things, he points out that one of the strengths of the American research university as it developed from the federal government’s grants of land in the various states for the purpose of building universities – the famous Land Grants of the mid-nineteenth century – was the fact that independent research laboratories and institutes were by and large incorporated into the universities where they could benefit from a broader research community. Similarly, separate professional schools



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that existed independently in fields such as medicine and law were incorporated into universities, again strengthening the institutions and bringing a wider area of expertise into professional education. In many of his writings, Shils displays a profound respect for the history of higher education, arguing that universities, more than most other social institutions, are influenced by academic traditions and historical precedents. Tradition A concern with the societal importance of tradition was a recurring theme in Shils’ work and underscored deeply conservative tendencies (Shils, 1981a). Shils feared social disruption whether from the Right or the Left, and felt that the basic centre of society must be protected. Perhaps influenced by the rise of Fascism in Europe in the 1930s, and exposed to urban disorder as a social worker in Chicago during the Depression, Shils saw first-hand the dangers of societal disruption. He was sharply critical of the student radicals of the 1960s in several essays. He repeatedly stressed the importance of social cohesion, and emphasized the importance of intellectuals and of academic institutions in helping to shape the central ideas of society. He was quite critical of what he saw as the antinomian ideas of intellectuals, academics, students, and the university community generally, arguing that those with the power to shape the underlying ideas about society should respect the traditions of society, and build constructively on those traditions rather than constantly criticize social institutions and norms (Shils, 1969b). While he was not a traditional conservative, Shils’ basic understanding of society led him to conservative stances on contemporary issues. His conviction that society is a fragile institution that requires nurturing resulted in a consistent emphasis on social cohesion and tradition in his work. Indeed, he examined the Confucian-based societies of Asia that have exhibited a strong sense of cohesion to consider what lessons might be learned. Just as he was convinced that the individual needed to have a commitment to society, he also believed that society owed the individual freedom from undue restrictions on thought or action. Similarly, academic institutions were owed loyalty by members of the academic community, but at the same time had the responsibility to provide academic freedom as well as autonomy for the professoriate to govern the university. Developing countries From the time of the end of colonialism in Asia and Africa, starting with India in 1947, Shils was concerned both with the emergence of the developing nations of what was then called the Third World, and with the

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development of universities in these countries (Shils, 1959). After research in India in 1959 and 1960, he developed a long-term interest in that country; Shils wrote about both Indian students and the academic profession (Shils, 1961c, 1961d, 1969a). Along with his colleague Eric Ashby (1966) and a very few others, Shils was convinced that the developing countries needed effective universities and was sympathetic to their evolution at a time when little attention was paid, either within the developing countries or in the West, to the development of higher education (Shils, 1968c). While by no means blind to the serious problems of capacity and other difficulties, Shils saw universities in the developing world as ‘real’ universities with research capacity and involvement in the international network of higher education, and not as the second-class institutions described by many of his contemporaries. In this, he was ahead of his time – the World Bank and many policymakers in the development context ignored higher education for several decades as they sought to expand literacy and basic education. This is widely acknowledged to have been a costly mistake; many of the countries in question are now challenged to enter the global knowledge economy of the twenty-first century, given the relatively limited scale of investment in their tertiary sectors. Conclusion Edward Shils held to his convictions during a period of dramatic change in higher education globally – the era of massification, the unprecedented turmoil of the 1960s, and the beginning of the era of the global knowledge economy. He wrote frequently about autonomy, academic freedom, accountability, the responsibility of faculty and students, the importance of research, and related topics. He continued to articulate a vision of the university that was true to Humboldt and Weber, holding to traditional academic values and advocating autonomy for institutions as well as a sense of ‘calling’ (as Weber would put it) for faculty. He stressed the importance of research, especially basic research, as a key role for universities, and argued that public support for the academic institutions form the basis of a modern post-industrial society. Despite his criticisms of the foibles of academic institutions and his dismay with the direction of public policy, Shils remained loyal to the traditional values of higher education. Has Edward Shils been influential in the shaping of the modern American university, and has his vision been seriously considered by policymakers within and outside the universities? His journal, Minerva, remains perhaps the best single source for thoughtful writing on issues of science and higher-education policy, although its circulation is small and it is not widely influential in policy circles. Shils’ own writings have brought a



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consistent perspective to the debate – but in the twenty-first century they are infrequently cited. His perspectives are not widely shared by contemporary policymakers in academe or in government. The German model research university that was so influential from the late nineteenth century until the latter part of the twentieth century is no longer the dominant institution. Events have overtaken academe, and Shils’ ideas of institutional autonomy, of academic freedom, of the academic profession as a ‘calling’ for high-minded scholars and scientists, and of a community of scholars seem quaintly anachronistic in this age of downsizing and accountability. More important, and in the long run more damaging, the idea that the university should be the dominant home for basic science and research is no longer so influential. ‘Workforce development’ and applied research has replaced ‘the life of the mind’ and basic research. Yet, Edward Shils brings an important message to academe. Now questioned, his perspective remains relevant. It might even be the case that the university of the twenty-first century needs to revive the ideas that Shils so eloquently advocated throughout his life.

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Concluding comments: Edward Shils – the ‘outsider’ Christopher Adair-Toteff Stephen Turner introduced this volume by pointing out the many contradictions in Edward Shils’ thinking. The focus of these concluding comments is to add to Turner’s account by addressing Shils’ influence and by evaluating his successes and failures. Not only did Shils embody many contradictions, but he was also the embodiment of an ‘outsider’. Born to Russian immigrant parents and brought up in Pennsylvania in the United States, he was drawn to an eclectic and wide range of authors. In fact, for his whole life he can be described as an ‘outsider’. Whether this was due to Shils’ own intentions or due to other factors is not relevant; what is, is that he seemed either to relish that position or to be indifferent to it. Edward Shils had earned a single undergraduate degree, yet he became one of the foremost scholars of the twentieth century. That degree was in languages, but he became a sociologist. He was trained in French, but his translations are primarily of German works. He is most famous for his translations of Karl Mannheim, yet he was never really a disciple of Mannheim’s. Shils also translated some of Max Weber’s methodological writings, and although he certainly held Weber in high regard, it is unlikely that Shils would have been comfortable with the assertion that he was a ‘Weberian’. Shils worked with Talcott Parsons, but they had significantly different views regarding sociology. Finally, Shils was a very private person, but he had a very large and powerful public persona. Being regarded as an ‘outsider’ was not a negative for Edward Shils; rather, it was undoubtedly one of the traits which made him highly successful and likely contributed to his extensive influence. Because Shils was a very private person it is difficult to assess his personal life. That he was married and divorced twice and had a son is not very remarkable; what is, is that very few people who otherwise knew him well were aware of Shils’ family history. His public persona is different both in what it was and what we know about it. By many accounts, Shils was a difficult person to get along with because he seemed short-tempered



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and prone to criticizing. Yet, there are also a number of accounts of his personal generosity and his scholarly support. Regarding his non-scholarly positions it seems safe to say that Shils achieved a high degree of recognition, if not fame. Turner earlier referred to the eager anticipation of the ‘Shils cable’ during the Second World War and to his highly regarded work with numerous soldiers after it. Regarding his scholarly positions, his life seemed a mixture of failure and success. The fact that he had caused a rift with the Sociology Department at Chicago must be counted as a failure of sorts; yet, that he held appointments at the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics (LSE) has to be regarded as a major success. That he also taught at Manchester and at Cambridge add to the impressive places with which Shils was associated. In addition, the fact that he was invited to give the Jefferson Lectures must be viewed as a crowning achievement of a lifetime. Shils’ founding of the journal Minerva was a major achievement; that he was the major force for it for more than twenty years is a testament to his strong dedication to it and to his editorial stamina. That he wrote a number of books and a large number of essays is impressive enough, but that they are on an incredibly rich range of subjects is even more so. It appears that Shils regarded not having written a ‘great book’ outlining his project as a failure. However, that might have been an impossible task for him. While he recognized the importance of the intellectual in modern society, he did not develop a clear concept of the modern intellectual. That was partially because his viewpoint shifted from that of a sociologist to that of a humanist. And it was because Shils himself transcended disciplinary boundaries and preferred to consider individuals and societies with all of their complexities and contradictions. Social structures defy easy definitions, as do humans – and Shils was definitely a human being. Shils pursued elusive topics, such as transcendence and the sacred. But it is a mistake to confuse elusiveness with falsity, and truth with clarity and accessibility. It is perhaps a prejudice of scientism that only that which is explicit and publicly available is valid. Shils was free of this prejudice, and thought accordingly. He was able to see the ubiquity of the sacred, and the place of the transcendental in such mundane but inscrutable facts about human relations as loyalty and deference. Max Weber spoke of being religiously unmusical. Shils’ intellectual legacy is perhaps fully available only to those who share, to some extent, the sense of transcendence with which Edward Shils approached social life.

Appendix

Bibliography of the published works of Professor Edward Shils Christine C. Schnusenberg and Gordon B. Neavill1 The published works of Professor Edward Shils reflect an extraordinary range of intellectual interests, an international perspective, and an enormous productivity extending over a period of six decades. His writings have appeared throughout the world and have been reprinted and translated widely. We have tried to make this bibliography as inclusive and accurate as possible, but there is no doubt that we have fallen short of our objective. There are published works that remain to be identified, reprints and translations that we have missed, and manuscripts that are likely to be published in the future. The bibliography is arranged chronologically. Within each year books are listed first. Next are journal articles arranged alphabetically by journal, followed by chapters in collective works. A handful of sound recordings of lectures and panel discussions that have been identified are listed last. Several items that could not be verified have been omitted; most of these are probably bibliographical ghosts that were projected for publication but have not yet appeared. The bibliography has been compiled over a period of years and reflects the contributions of several hands. The first part, covering the years to 1983, was originally compiled by Christine C. Schnusenberg, Assistant to Professor Shils, with the help of the following students: Liah Greenfeld, Michel Martin, John Mulholland, Peggy Rampersad, and Henrik Verest. It was presented to Professor Shils on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday at a dinner at the House of Hunan in Chicago on 1 July 1985 and was subsequently distributed as a working tool to students and colleagues. In 1993 Professor Shils expressed interest in bringing the bibliography up to date, and Dr Schnusenberg promised to have it ready for his eighty-fifth birthday. After Professor Shils’ death on 23 January 1995, Gordon B. Neavill, a former student and now a member of the faculty of the Library and Information Science Program at Wayne State University, offered his assistance in completing the bibliography and preparing it for publication. Working from drafts provided by Dr Schnusenberg, he was able to add a number of new entries and to supply bibliographical details missing from

appendix 215 entries in the original version and subsequent drafts. He was aided in this work by his graduate assistant at Wayne State University, Charles Barney Sands, who devoted himself to the project with exceptional dedication and persistence. Christine C. Schnusenberg and Gordon B. Neavill assume full responsibility for the errors and omissions that remain. 1936 Translation with Louis Wirth. Mannheim, Karl. (1936). Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 318pp. 1938 ‘Limitations on the freedom of research and teaching in the social sciences’. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 200 (November), 144–64. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 307–32), 1972. 1939 With Herbert Goldhamer. (1939). ‘Types of power and status’. American Journal of Sociology, 45(2), September, 171–82. Reprinted as ‘Power and status’ in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 239–48), 1975. 1940 Translation. Mannheim, Karl. (1940). Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction: Studies in Modern Social Structure. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 469pp. ‘The bases of social stratification in Negro society: A research memorandum’. Prepared for the Carnegie–Myrdal study, The Negro in America. New York: Carnegie Corp., 1940. Typescript. 69 leaves. Available in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, and on microfilm. 1941 Translation with Edith Lowenstein and Klaus Knorr. Fraenkel, Ernst. (1941). The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. New York and London: Oxford University Press. 248pp. ‘A note on governmental research on attitudes and morale’. (1941). American Journal of Sociology, 47(3), September, 472–80. ‘Irrationality and planning: A note on Mannheim’s Man and Society in an Age of Transformation’. Journal of Liberal Religion, 2(Winter), 148–53.

216 appendix 1945 ‘Britain and the world: The position of the Labour Party in foreign policy’. Review of Politics, 7(4), October, 505–24. 1946 ‘Some political implications of the State Department report’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1(9), 15 April, 7–9, 19. ‘Atomic Energy in the House of Commons’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1(10), 1 May, 13–15. ‘A Soviet comment on American atomic policy’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1(12), 1 June, 16. ‘Social and psychological aspects of displacement and repatriation’. Journal of Social Issues, 2(3), August, 3–18. With Thomas Finletter and Harold Urey. ‘The United Nations and the Bomb: A radio discussion’. University of Chicago Round Table (radio programme). Chicago: University of Chicago. Transcript. 28pp. 1947 With Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz. ‘A study of the social, economic, and psychological correlates of intolerance among urban veterans of enlisted rank’ [abstract]. American Psychologist, 2(8), August, 323. ‘British atomic energy debate’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 3(2), February, 52–4. ‘The Atomic Bomb and the veto on sanctions’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 3(2), February, 62–3. ‘A critique of planning in science: The Society for Freedom in Science’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 3(3), March, 80–2. ‘American policy and the Soviet ruling group’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 3(9), September, 237–41, 246. ‘Atomic energy control’. Discovery, 8(4), April, 114–17. ‘Karl Mannheim’. Erasmus, 1(4), 15 February, 193–6. ‘Political science and sociology’. Review of Democracy and Industry, by Constance Reaveley and John Winnington (London: Chatto & Windus, 1947). Erasmus, 1(13–14), August, 693–7. ‘Displacement and repatriation: A sociological analysis’. Left News, 127(January), 3755–61. ‘Human nature in industrial societies’. Listener, 37(961), 26 June, 1005–7. ‘European letter: l’. University Observer: A Journal of Politics, 1(1), Winter, 37–41. ‘Socialism in America’. University Observer: A Journal of Politics 1(2), Summer, 96–102.

appendix 217 ‘The present situation in American sociology’. Pilot Papers, 2(2), June, 8–36. 1948 The Atomic Bomb in World Politics. Peace Aims Pamphlet. London: National Peace Council. 79pp. The Present State of American Sociology. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 64pp. ‘The House of Lords debates international control’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 4(4), April, 122–4. ‘The failure of the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission: An interpretation’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 4(7), July, 205–10. ‘The next phase of international control discussions’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 4(12), December, 359–62. ‘Some remarks on the theory of social and economic organization’. Economica, n.s. 15(57), February, 36–50. ‘The failure of atomic control, part 1: Russia’s responsibility’. Manchester Guardian, 31(764), 3 August, 4. Reprinted in Manchester Guardian Weekly, 59(7), 12 August, 5. ‘The failure of atomic control, part 2: The American responsibility’. Manchester Guardian, 31(765), 4 August, 4. Reprinted in Manchester Guardian Weekly 59(8), 19 August, 13. ‘The atomic problem: Professor Blackett’s book’. Manchester Guardian, 31(845), 5 November, 4. Reprinted in Manchester Guardian Weekly 59(20), 11 November, 12. ‘Russia and the atom’. New Commonwealth (London) 9(7), December, 150–2. With Morris Janowitz. (1948). ‘Cohesion and disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II’. Public Opinion Quarterly, 12(2), Summer, 280–315. Reprinted in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 345–83), 1975. 1949 Translated and edited with Henry A. Finch, with a foreword. Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 188pp. Later printings as: Weber, Max. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. ‘Blackett’s apologia for the Soviet position’. Review of Fear, War, and the Bomb, by P. M. S. Blackett (New York: Whittlesey, 1949). Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 5(2), February, 33–47. ‘Social science and social policy’. Philosophy of Science, 16(3), July, 219–42. Reprinted in The Calling of Sociology and Other Essays on the Pursuit of Learning (pp. 259–88), 1980. ‘The relevance of sociology’. Universities Quarterly 3(2), February, 584–92.

218 appendix Sound recording with Martin Avrams and Alan Simpson. ‘The British welfare state: What is it?’ Radio discussion on University of Chicago Round Table (radio programme), 28 August. Sound tape reel (30 min.). Copy in Michigan State University Library. 1950 Primary groups in the American Army. In Robert K. Merton and Paul F. Lazarsfeld (eds), Continuities of Social Research: Studies in the Scope and Method of ‘The American Soldier’ (pp. 19–39). Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Reprinted in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 384–402), 1975. Georges Sorel: Introduction to the American edition. In Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, translated by T. E. Hulme and J. Roth (pp. 13–29). Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Society. In Chambers’s Encyclopedia (pp. 670–1). London: George Newnes; New York: Oxford University Press. 1951 With Henry Dicks. (1951). The Soviet Army. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Edited with Talcott Parsons. Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 506pp. Reprinted as Toward a General Theory of Action: Theoretical Foundations for the Social Sciences. New York: Harper Torchbooks, Harper & Row, 1962. ‘The Soviet elite: Analysis of a legend’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 7(3), March, 77–80. ‘Congressional investigations: The legislator and his environment’. University of Chicago Law Review, 18(3), Spring, 571–84. Informal organization and formal organization. In Robert Dubin (ed), Human Relations in Administration: The Sociology of Organization, with Readings and Cases (pp. 49–51). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. With Herbert Goldhamer. Types of power. In Robert Dubin (ed.), Human Relations in Administration: The Sociology of Organization, with Readings and Cases (pp. 182–7). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. The study of the primary group. In Harold D. Lasswell and Daniel Lerner (eds), The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments in Scope and Methods (pp. 44–69). Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. L’étude du groupe élémentaire. In Harold D. Lasswell and Daniel Lerner (eds), Les ‘Sciences de la Politique’ aux États-Unis (pp. 65–104). Paris: Librairie Armand Colin.

appendix 219 1952 ‘America’s paper curtain’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 8(7), October, 210–17. ‘Lo stato attuale della sociologia americana’ (translation of Shils, [1948] The Present State of American Sociology), Parts 1–4. Quaderni di Sociologia, 4(Spring), 179–90; 5(Summer), 3–10; 6(Autumn), 90–108; 7 (Winter), 155–67. 1953 With Talcott Parsons and Robert F. Bales. Working Papers on the Theory of Action. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 269pp. Reprinted, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981. With Michael Young. ‘The meaning of the coronation’. Sociological Review, n.s. 1(2), December, 63–81. Reprinted in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 135–52), 1975. 1954 Translated with Max Rheinstein. Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society, edited by Max Rheinstein. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 363pp. ‘Conspiratorial hallucinations’. Review of The Secret War for the A-Bomb, by Medford Evans (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1953). Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 10(2), February, 51–4. ‘The scientific community: Thoughts after Hamburg’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 10(5), May, 151–5. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 204–12), 1972. ‘Scientists affirm faith in Oppenheimer’ [statement]. Bulletin on the Atomic Scientists, 10(5), May, 189. ‘The slippery slope’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 10(6), June, 242, 256. (1954). ‘Scientists, administrators and politicians: The report of the Riehlman Committee’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 10(10), December, 371–4. Populism and the Rule of Law. In Scott Buchanan (ed.), Conference on Jurisprudence and Politics (pp. 91–107). Chicago: University of Chicago Law School, 1955. Authoritarianism ‘Right’ and ‘Left’. In Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda (eds), Studies in the Scope and Method of ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ (pp. 24–49). Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 1955 Editor: Secrecy, Security and Loyalty [collection of articles on this theme]. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 11(4), April.

220 appendix ‘Security and science sacrificed to loyalty’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 11(4), April, 106–9, 130. ‘The intellectuals: Great Britain’. Encounter, 4(4), April, 5–16. Reprinted as ‘British intellectuals in the twentieth century’ in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 135–53), 1972. Contributor. Science and Freedom: The Proceedings of a Conference Convened by the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Held in Hamburg on July 23–26, 1953 (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1955), pp. 48–9, 174–5, 180. 1956 The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies. Glencoe, IL: Free Press; London: Heinemann. 238pp. Reprinted, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press (Arcturus Paperbacks); London: Peffer & Simons, 1974. Reprinted with an Introduction by Daniel P. Moynihan, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee (Elephant Paperbacks), 1996.(1956). ‘Milan conference’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 12(2), February, 38–40. ‘Two patterns of publicity, privacy, and secrecy’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 12(6), June, 215–20. 1957 ‘Primordial, personal, sacred, and civil ties: Some particular observations on the relationship of sociological research and theory’. British Journal of Sociology, 8(2), June, 130–45. Reprinted in Selected Essays (pp. 37–52), 1970; Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 111–26), 1975. ‘Freedom and influence: Observations on the scientists’ movement in the United States’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 13(1), January, 13–18. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 196–203), 1972. ‘The intellectuals, public opinion, and economic development’. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 6(1), October, 55–62. ‘Daydreams and nightmares: Reflections on the criticism of mass culture’. Sewanee Review, 65(4), October–December, 586–608. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 248–64), 1972. 1958 ‘The intellectuals and the powers: Some perspectives for comparative analysis’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1(1), October, 5–22. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 3–22), 1972; The Constitution of Society (pp. 179–201), 1982.

appendix 221 ‘Tradition and liberty: Antinomy and interdependence’. Ethics, 68(3), April, 153–65. ‘Ideology and civility: On the politics of the intellectual’. Sewanee Review, 66(3), July–September, 450–80. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 42–70), 1972. ‘Intellectuals, public opinion, and economic development’. World Politics, 10(2), January, 232–55. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 424–44), 1972. ‘The concentration and dispersion of charisma: Their bearing on economic policy in underdeveloped countries’. World Politics, 11(1), October, 1–19. Reprinted in Selected Essays (pp. 53–71), 1970; Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 405–21), 1975. 1959 ‘Old societies, new states: A dialogue at Rhodes’. Encounter, 12(3), March, 32–41. ‘La metrópolis y la provincia en la comunidad intelectual’. Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 3(4), December, 493–508. ‘The culture of the Indian intellectual’. Sewanee Review, 67(2), April–June, 239–61. ‘The prospects for intellectuals: Reflections of a sociologist’. Soviet Survey, 29 (July–September), 81–9. ‘Ideology and civility’. Twentieth Century, 166(989), July, 3–12. Social inquiry and the autonomy of the individual. In Daniel Lerner (ed.), The Human Meaning of the Social Sciences (pp. 114–57). Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, World Publishing Co. Reprinted in expanded form as ‘Social inquiry and the autonomy of the private sphere’ in The Calling of Sociology and Other Essays on the Pursuit of Learning (pp. 421–51), 1980. Resentments and hostilities of legislators: sources, objects, consequences. In John C. Wahlke and Heinz Eulau (eds), Legislative Behavior (pp. 347–54). Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 1960 Koi no Sago Riron o Mezashite (translation of Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils (eds), Toward a General Theory of Action [1951], pts 1–2). Translated by Nagai Michio, Sakuta Keiichi, and Hashimoto Makoto Kyoyaku. Tokyo: Nihon Hyoron Shinsha. 445pp. ‘The moral relationship between the investigator and his “data”’. Bollettino del Centro per la Ricerca operative, 2(1), 15–23. ‘Political development in the new states’, parts 1 and 2. Comparative Studies in Sociology and History, 2(3), April, 265–92; 2(4), July, 379–411.

222 appendix ‘Mass society and its culture’. Daedalus, 89(2), Spring, 288–314. Reprinted in Norman Jacob (ed.), Culture for the Millions? Mass Media in Modern Society (pp. 1–27). New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1961; Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Reprinted in expanded form in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 229–47), 1972. ‘The traditions of intellectual life: Their conditions of existence and growth in contemporary societies’. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 1(2), September, 177–94. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 71–94), 1972. ‘On the Eve’. Twentieth Century, 167(999), May, 445–59. ‘The intellectual in the political development of the new states’. World Politics, 12(3), April, 329–68. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 386–423), 1972. The traditions of intellectuals. In George B. de Huszar (ed.), The Intellectuals: A Controversial Portrait (pp. 55–61). Glencoe, IL: Free Press. ‘The prospects for Lebanese civility’. In Leonard Binder (ed.), Politics in Lebanon (pp. 1–11). New York: John Wiley. 1961 The Intellectual between Tradition and Modernity: The Indian Situation. Comparative Studies in Society and History; Supplement I. The Hague: Mouton. 120pp. Edited with Talcott Parsons, Kasper D. Naegele, and Jesse R. Pitts. Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 2 v. (1479 pp.). ‘Scientific development in the new states’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 17(2), February, 48–52. ‘The false prospera: Observations on Mrs. Elspeth Huxley’. Encounter, 17(1), July, 82–7. ‘Indian students: Rather Sadhus than Philistines’. Encounter, 17(3), September, 12–20. ‘Further observations on Mrs. Huxley’. Encounter, 17(4), October, 44–9. ‘Definitions of culture’. New Statesman, 61(6), 2 June, 812. ‘Society: The idea and its sources’. Revue intemationale de philosophie, 15(55), 93–114. Reprinted in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 17–33), 1975. ‘The need for disciplined inquiry’. Universities Quarterly, 16(1), December, 14–18. ‘Professor Mills on the calling of sociology’. Review of The Sociological Imagination, by C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). World Politics, 13(4), July, 600–21.

appendix 223 Metropolis and province in the intellectual community. In N. V. Sovani and V. M. Dandekar (eds), Changing India: Essays in Honour of Professor D. R. Gadgil (pp. 275–94). Bombay and London: Asia Publishing House. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 355–71), 1972. Mass society and its culture. In Norman Jacobs (ed.), Culture for the Millions? Mass Media in Modern Society (pp. 1–27). New York: D. Van Nostrand; also contributions to panel discussion on pp. 155–200. Paperback reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Social sciences, law, and history, the year’s developments in. In Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler (eds), The Great Ideas Today (pp. 244–89). Chicago: William Benton. Organizational goals and primary groups. In Robert Dubin (ed.), Human Relations in Administration, with Readings and Cases, 2nd edn (pp. 81–3). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. With Herbert Goldhamer. Types of power. In Robert Dubin (ed.), Human Relations in Administration, with Readings and Cases, 2nd edn (pp. 247–52). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Centre and periphery. In The Logic of Personal Knowledge: Essays Presented to Professor Michael Polanyi (pp. 117–30). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Reprinted in Selected Essays (pp. 1–14), 1970; Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 3–16), 1975; The Constitution of Society (pp. 93–109), 1982. Influence and withdrawal: The intellectuals in Indian political development. In Dwaine Marvick (ed.), Political Decision Makers (pp. 29–56). New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Scientific development in the new states. In Ruth Gruber (ed.), Science and the New Nations: The Proceedings of the International Conference on Science in the Advancement of New States at Rehovoth, Israel (pp. 217–26). New York: Basic Books. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 457–66), 1972. The calling of sociology. In Edward Shils, Talcott Parsons, Kasper D. Naegele, and Jesse R. Pitts (eds), Theories of Society: Foundations of Modem Sociological Theory (pp. 1405–48). New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Reprinted in Selected Essays (pp. 99–142), 1970; reprinted in expanded form in The Calling of Sociology and Other Essays in the Pursuit of Learning (pp. 3–92), 1980. The macrosociological problem: Consensus and dissensus in the larger society. In Donald P. Ray (ed.), Trends in Social Science (pp. 60–83). New York: Philosophical Library.

224 appendix ‘Class’. In Encyclopedia Britannica (pp. 766–8). Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica. Reprinted in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 249–55), 1975. 1962 Editor. Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy I 1962–94 (32 years). Political Development in the New States. The Hague: Mouton. 91pp. ‘The theory of mass society’. Diogenes, 39 (July–September), 45–66. Reprinted in Selected Essays (pp. 15–36), 1970; Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 91–107), 1975; The Constitution of Society (pp. 69–89), 1982. ‘Politicians and scientists’. Encounter, 18(1), January, 103–6. ‘Indian students: Rather Sadhus than Philistines’. Journal of Sociology (Jabalpur, India), 33–52. ‘Minerva’ [editorial]. Minerva 1(1), Autumn, 5–17. The military in the political development of the new states. In John J. Johnson (ed.), The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries (pp. 7–67). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Reprinted in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 483–516), 1975. The autonomy of science. In Bernard Barber and Walter Hirsch (eds), The Sociology of Science (pp. 610–22) New York: Free Press of Glencoe. 1963 ‘The bookshop in America’. Daedalus, 92(1), Winter, 92–104. ‘Observations on the American university’. Universities Quarterly, 17(2), March, 182–93. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 298–306), 1972. The theory of mass society. In Phillip Olson (ed.), America as a Mass Society (pp. 30–47). New York: Free Press of Glencoe. The bookshop in America. In Roger H. Smith (ed.), The American Reading Public: What It Reads, Why It Reads (pp. 138–50) New York: R. R. Bowker. The Asian intellectual. In Guy Wint (ed.), Asia: A Handbook (pp. 596–607). New York: Frederick A. Praeger. Reprinted as ‘Asian intellectuals’ in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 372–85), 1972. Why the failure? In Morton Grodzins and Eugene Rabinowitch (eds), The Atomic Age: Scientists and World Affairs (pp. 76–91). New York: Basic Books.

appendix 225 America’s paper curtain. In Morton Grodzins and Eugene Rabinowitch (eds), The Atomic Age: Scientists and World Affairs (pp. 414–27). New York: Basic Books. Demagogues and cadres in the political development of the new states. In Lucian W. Pye (ed.), Communications and Political Development (pp. 64–77). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 445–56), 1972. British intellectuals. In Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, and Melvin J. Lasky (eds); selected by Melvin J. Lasky, Encounters: An Anthology from the First Ten Years of Encounter Magazine (pp. 177–94). London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; New York: Basic Books. The contemplation of society in America. In Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, and Morton White (eds), Paths of American Thought (pp. 392–410). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Reprinted in The Calling of Sociology and Other Essays on the Pursuit of Learning (pp. 95–133), 1980. 1964 ‘Leo Szilard, a memoir’. Encounter, 23(6), December, 35–41. ‘Know-Nothings and eggheads’. Spectator, 212(7077), 14 February, 1964, 217. ‘The charismatic center’. Spectator, 213(7115), 6 November, 1964, 608. The high culture of the age. In Robert N. Wilson (ed.), The Arts and Society (pp. 315–62). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 97–134), 1972. The military in the political development of the new states. In David E. Novak and Robert Lekachman (eds), Development and Society: The Dynamics of Economic Change (pp. 393–405). New York: St. Martin’s Press. The fortunes of constitutional government in the political development of the new states. In John J. Hallowell (ed.), Development: For What? (pp. 103–43). Durham, NC: Published for the Lilly Endowment Research Program in Christianity and Politics by Duke University Press. Reprinted in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 456–82), 1975. 1965 ‘Charisma, order and status’. American Sociological Review, 30(2), April, 199–213. Reprinted in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 256–75), 1975; The Constitution of Society (pp. 119–42), 1982. Toward a modern intellectual community in the new states. In James S. Coleman (ed.), Education and Political Development (pp. 498–518). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 335–54), 1972.

226 appendix 1966 ‘Opposition in the new states of Asia and Africa’. Government and Opposition, 1(2), February, 175–204. ‘Privacy: Its constitution and vicissitudes’. Law and Contemporary Problems 31(2), Spring, 281–306. Reprinted in Selected Essays (pp. 73–98), 1970. The African intellectuals. In R. Pierce Beaver (ed.), Christianity and African Education: The Papers of a Conference at the University of Chicago (pp. 123–38). Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eardmans. Modernization and higher education. In Myron Weiner (ed.), Modernization: The Dynamics of Growth (pp. 87–103). Washington, DC: Voice of America Forum Lectures; also published: New York: Basic Books (pp. 81–97), 1966. With Morris Janowitz. Cohesion and disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II. In Bernard Berelson and Morris Janowitz (eds), Reader in Public Opinion, 2nd edn (pp. 401–17). New York: Free Press. Mass society and its culture. In Bernard Berelson and Morris Janowitz (eds), Reader in Public Opinion, 2nd edn (pp. 505–28). New York: Free Press. Society. In Chambers’s Encyclopedia, vol. 12 (pp. 667–8). Oxford: Pergamon Press. 1967 ‘The intellectuals and the future’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 23(8), October, 7–14. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 213–28), 1972. ‘Color, the universal intellectual community, and the Afro-Asian intellectual’. Daedalus, 96(2), Spring, 279–95. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 467–81), 1972. ‘The sanctity of life’. Encounter, 28(1), January, 39–49. Reprinted in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 219–35), 1975. ‘The ways of sociology’. Encounter, 28(6), June, 85–91. ‘Tendenza della ricerca sociologica’. Quaderni di Sociologia, 16(1), January/ March, 3–37. Privacy and power. In Ithiel de Sola Pool (ed.), Contemporary Political Science: Toward Empirical Theory. New York: McGraw-Hill. Reprinted in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 317–44), 1975. The stratification system of mass society. In Balgit Singh and V. B. Singh (eds), Social and Economic Change: Essays in Honour of Prof D. P. Mukerji (pp. 163–77). Bombay; New York: Allied Publishers. Reprinted

appendix 227 in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 304–14), 1975. 1968 Editor. Criteria for Scientific Development: Public Policy and National Goals: A Selection of Articles from Minerva. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968, 207pp. Editor with Talcott Parsons. Hacia una teoría general de la acción (translation of Toward a General Theory of Action). Buenos Aires: Editorial Kapelusz, 555 pp. ‘The profession of science’. Advancement of Science, 24(122), June, 469–79. ‘The intellectual in developing nations’. Dialogue, 1(2), 31–6. ‘Consenso e dissenso’. Rassegna Italiana de Sociologia, 9(1), January– March, 23–48. ‘The implantation of universities: Reflections on a theme of Ashby’. Universities Quarterly, 22(2), March, 142–66. Society and societies: The macro-sociological view. In Talcott Parsons (ed.), American Sociology: Perspectives, Problems, Methods (pp. 287–303). New York: Basic Books. Reprinted in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 34–47), 1975; The Constitution of Society (pp. 53–68), 1982. Charisma. In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 2 (pp. 386–90). New York: Macmillan and Free Press. Reprinted in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 127–34), 1975; The Constitution of Society (pp. 110–18), 1982. The concept of consensus. In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 3 (pp. 260–6). New York: Macmillan and Free Press. The concept and function of ideology. In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 7 (pp. 66–76). New York: Macmillan and Free Press. Reprinted as ‘Ideology’ in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 23–41), 1972; The Constitution of Society (pp. 202–23), 1982. Intellectuals. In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 7 (pp. 399–415). New York: Macmillan and Free Press. Karl Mannheim. In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 9 (pp. 557–62). New York: Macmillan and Free Press. The sanctity of life. In Life or Death: Ethics and Options: Six Essays (pp. 2–38). Portland, OR: Reed College. Reprinted Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1970. Ritual and crisis. In Donald R. Cutler (ed.), The Religious Situation (pp. 733–48). Boston: Beacon Press. Reprinted in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 153–63), 1975.

228 appendix Deference. In John A. Jackson (ed.), Social Stratification (pp. 104–32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reprinted in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 276–303), 1975; The Constitution of Society (pp. 143–75), 1982. 1969 ‘Plenitude and scarcity: The anatomy of an international cultural crisis’. Encounter, 32(5), May, 37–48. Reprinted in The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (pp. 265–97), 1972. ‘The academic profession in India’. Minerva, 7(3), Spring, 345–72. The intellectuals and the powers: Some perspectives for comparative analysis. In Philip Rieff (ed.), On Intellectuals: Theoretical Studies, Case Studies (pp. 25–48). Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Reflections on deference. In Arnold A. Rogow (ed.), Politics, Personality, and Social Science in the Twentieth Century: Essays in Honor of Harold D. Lasswell (pp. 297–345). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1970 Selected Essays. Chicago: Center for Social Organization Studies, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. 142pp. ‘Tradition, ecology, and institution in the history of sociology’. Daedalus, 99(4), Autumn, 760–825. Reprinted in The Calling of Sociology and Other Essays on the Pursuit of Learning (pp. 165–256), 1980; The Constitution of Society (pp. 275–383), 1982. ‘Aspects of sociology: The tyranny of tradition, some prefatory remarks’. Encounter 34(3), March, 57–61. ‘The hole in the centre: University government in the United States’ [editorial]. Minerva, 8(1), January, 1–7. ‘How many scientists and technologists?’ [editorial]. Minerva, 8(2), April, 155–9. ‘Are academics fit for self-government?’ Review of The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going, by Jacques Barzun (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). Minerva 8(2), April, 308–13. ‘A neglected problem of science policy’ [editorial]. Minerva, 8(3), July, 321–4. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Presidents and professors in American university government’. Minerva, 8(3), July, 440. ‘The political university and academic freedom’ [editorial]. Minerva, 8(4), October, 479–91. ‘Student participation: Consultation or voting power’. Review of The Rise of the Student Estate in Britain, by Eric Ashby and Mary Anderson (London: Macmillan, 1970). Minerva 8(4), October, 611–23.

appendix 229 ‘Report of the Committee on the Criteria of Academic Appointment’. University of Chicago Record, 4(6), 17 December, 1–15. 1971 Génesis de la sociología contemporánea (translation of ‘Tradition, Ecology, and Institution in the History of Sociology’, 1970). Madrid: Seminarios y Ediciones. 169pp. ‘Tradition’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 13(2), April, 122–59. Reprinted in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (pp. 182–218), 1975. ‘The disestablishment of science’. Encounter, 37(5), November, 88–93. ‘Of pride and men of little faith’ [editorial]. Minerva, 9(1), January, 1–6. ‘Academic appointment, university autonomy and the federal government’ [editorial]. Minerva, 9(2), Apri1, 161–70. ‘The criteria of academic appointment’ [report of the Committee on the Criteria of Academic Appointment, University of Chicago]. Minerva, 9(2), April, 272–90. ‘No salvation outside higher education’ [editorial]. Minerva, 9(3), July, 313–21. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Consultation or voting power’, by Eric Ashby and Mary Anderson. Minerva, 9(3), July, 400. ‘Anti-Science’ [editorial]. Minerva, 9(4), October, 441–50. ‘Deferencia’. In John A. Jackson, Edward Shils, Mark Abrams, and others, Estratificación social (translation of Social Stratification, 1968) (pp. 125–59). Barcelona: Ediciones Península. ‘From periphery to center: The changing place of intellectuals in American society’. In Bernard Barber and Alex Inkels (eds), Stability and Social Change (pp. 211–43). Boston: Little, Brown. 1972 The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays. Selected Papers of Edward Shils I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 481 pp. Includes the following previously unpublished essay: ‘Intellectuals and the center of society in the United States’. ‘Lo sviluppo politico degli stati nuovi: La volonta di essere modemi’. Centro Sociale, 19(December), 49–78. ‘Intellectuals, tradition, and traditions of intellectuals: Some preliminary considerations’. Daedalus, 101(2), Spring, 21–34. ‘The prospect of civility’. Encounter, 39(5), November, 32–7. ‘Minerva: The past decade and the next’ [editorial]. Minerva, 10(1), January, 1–9.

230 appendix Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The obligations of scientists as counsellors’. Minerva, 10(1), January, 107–10. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Universities in danger: The United States Office for Civil Rights contra Columbia University’. Minerva, 10(2), April, 319. ‘Stanford and Berlin: The spheres of politics and intellect’ [editorial]. Minerva, 10(3), July, 351–61. ‘The invitation to Caesar’ [editorial]. Minerva, 10(4), October, 513–18. 1973 ‘The American private university’. Minerva, 11(1), January, 6–29. ‘The redemptive power of science’ [editorial]. Minerva, 11(1), January, 1–5. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The sociological and psychological study of scientific activity’, by D. M. Gvishiani, S .R. Mikulinsky, and M. G. Yaroshevsky. Minerva, 11(1), January, 121. ‘Trojan horses’ [editorial]. Minerva, 11(3), July, 285–9. ‘Muting the social sciences at Berkeley’ [editorial]. Minerva, 11(3), July, 290–5. ‘The freedom of teaching and research’ [editorial]. Minerva, 11(4), October, 433–41. Edited and translated with introductory note. ‘The power of the state and the dignity of the academic calling in imperial Germany: The writings of Max Weber on university problems’. Minerva, 11(4), October, 571–632. 1974 Edited and translated with introductory note. Max Weber on Universities: The Power of the State and the Dignity of the Academic Calling in Imperial Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 62pp. ‘Twentieth-century classics revisited: Ideology and Utopia by Karl Mannheim’. Daedalus, 103(1), Winter, 83–9. ‘Faith, utility and the legitimacy of science’. Daedalus, 103(3), Summer, 1–15. ‘Elitism’ [editorial]. Minerva, 12(1), January, 1–7. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The reorganization of higher education in Sweden’. Minerva, 12(1), January, 83–114. ‘The public understanding of science’ [editorial]. Minerva, 12(2), April, 153–8. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Identity and openness in higher education’. Minerva, 12(2), April, 258. ‘An unresolved dilemma’ [editorial]. Minerva, 12(3), July, 295–302.

appendix 231 Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Social science policy in a new state: A programme for the stimulation of the social sciences in Indonesia’, by Clifford Geertz. Minerva, 12(3), July, 365. ‘The enemies of academic freedom’ [editorial]. Minerva, 12(4), October, 405–15. ‘Sources of charge in character and functions of universities’. Universities Quarterly, 28(3), Summer, 310–17. ‘Memorial tribute: Lloyd A. Fallers, 1925–1974’. University of Chicago Record, 8(7), November, 214–17. Sound recording with Hal Walker, moderator; Edward E. David, Jr; and Herbert Goldharner. ‘The Role of the Scientist in a Democracy. Conversations from Wingspread’; R-116. Racine, WS: Johnson Foundation. (On one side of one sound cassette [28 min., 29 sec.]). Copies in Michigan State University Library; University of Wisconsin, Parkside Library. 1975 Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology. Selected Papers of Edward Shils 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 516 pp. Includes the following previously unpublished essays: ‘The integration of society’, ‘Consensus’, and ‘Opposition in the new states of Asia and Africa’. With Talcott Parsons and Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Soziologie, autobiographisch: Drei kritische Berichte zur Entwicklung einer Wissenschaft. Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke. 232 pp. ‘The academic ethos under strain’. Minerva, 13(1), Spring, 1–37. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The intellectual situation in German higher education’, by Walter Ruegg. Minerva, 13(1), Spring, 103. ‘The confidentiality and anonymity of assessment’ [editorial]. Minerva, 13(2), Summer, 135–51. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The right to speak in American universities: The University of Chicago; Yale University’. Minerva, 13(2), Summer, 303, 305. ‘Alternatives to judgement by peers’ [editorial]. Minerva, 13(3), Autumn, 341–8. ‘Social science as centrality’. Society, 12(5), July-August, 6–9. The academic ethos under strain. In Paul Seabury (ed.), Universities in the Western World (pp. 16–46). New York: Free Press. 1976 Los intelectuales en los países en desarrollo (translation of The Intellectuals and the Powers, 1972). Buenos Aires: Ediciones Tres Tiempos. 214 pp.

232 appendix Los intelectuales en las sociedades modernas (translation of The Intellectuals and the Powers, 1972). Translated by Flora Setaro. Mexico: DIMELISA. 327pp. Reprinted, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Tres Tiempos, 1981. ‘Intellectuals and their discontents’. American Scholar, 45(2), Spring, 181–203. ‘What is a Liberal–Who is a Conservative? A Symposium’ [contributor]. Commentary, 62(3), September, 95–7. ‘A great citizen of the republic of science: Michael Polanyi, 1892–1976’ [editorial]. Minerva, 14(1), Spring, 1–5. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The criteria of academic appointment in American universities and colleges: Some documents of affirmative action at work’. Minerva, 14(1), Spring, 97. ‘The criteria of academic appointment’ [editorial]. Minerva, 14(4), Winter 1976/77, 407–18. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Criteria of academic appointment: Switzerland: The University of Geneva: A controversy about M. Jean Ziegler’. Minerva, 14(4), Winter 1976/77, 530. ‘The burden of 1917’. Survey, 22(3–4), Summer–Autumn, 139–46. Legitimizing the social sciences: Meeting the challenges to objectivity and integrity. In Charles Frankel (ed.), Controversies and Decisions: The Social Sciences and Public Policy (pp. 273–90). New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Reprinted in expanded form as ‘The pursuit of knowledge and the concern for the common good’ in The Calling of Sociology and Other Essays on the Pursuit of Learning (pp. 356– 417). 1977 ‘A profile of a military deserter’. Armed Forces and Society, 3(3), Spring, 427–32. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The soil and air of academic life’. Minerva, 15(2), Summer, 200–1. ‘Social science as public opinion’ [editorial]. Minerva, 15(3–4), Autumn– Winter, 273–285. Reprinted in The Calling of Sociology and Other Essays on the Pursuit of Learning (pp. 452–64). Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The military potential of civilian nuclear energy: Moving towards life in a nuclear armed crowd?’ by Albert Wohlstetter, Thomas A. Brown, Gregory Jones, David McGarvey, Henry Rowan, Vincent Taylor, and Roberta Wohlstetter. Minerva, 15(3–4), Autumn–Winter, 387–8. ‘Government and universities’. Newsletter of the International Council on the Future of the University, 4(1), November.

appendix 233 The academic ethos. In Hendrik W. van der Merwe and David Walsh (eds), The Future of the University in Southern Africa (pp. 5–22). Cape Town: D. Philip; New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1978 Edited with Peter Davison and Rolf Meyersohn. Literary Taste, Culture, and Mass Communication. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey; Teaneck, NJ: Somerset House, 1978–80. 14 vols. ‘The academic ethos’. American Scholar, 47(2), Spring, 165–90. ‘The order of learning in the United States from 1865–1920: The ascendancy of universities’. Minerva, 16(2), Summer, 159–95. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘A life-time in Soviet science reconsidered: The adventure of cybernetics in the Soviet Union’, by Amost Kolman. Minerva, 16(3), Autumn, 416. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The study of political science in the universities of Bangladesh’, by W. H. Morris-Jones. Minerva, 16(3), Autumn, 425. Mass society and its culture. In Edward Shils, Peter Davison, and Rolf Meyersohn (eds), Literary Taste, Culture, and Mass Communication, vol. 1, Culture and Mass Culture (pp. 201–9). Cambridge: ChadwyckHealey; Teaneck, NJ: Somerset House. On the eve. In Edward Shils, Peter Davison, and Rolf Meyersohn (eds), Literary Taste, Culture, and Mass Communication, vol. 6, The Sociology of Literature (pp. 237–53). Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey; Teaneck, NJ: Somerset House. Daydreams & nightmares: Reflections on the criticism of mass culture. In Edward Shils, Peter Davison, and Rolf Meyersohn (eds), Literary Taste, Culture, and Mass Communication, vol. 13, The Cultural Debate, pt 1 (pp. 17–38). Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey; Teaneck, NJ: Somerset House. The antinomies of liberalism. In Staff of the Research Institute on International Change, Columbia University (eds), The Relevance of Liberalism (pp. 135–200). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Government and universities. In Sidney Hook, Paul Kurtz, and Mira Todorovich (eds), The University and the State: What Role for Government in Higher Education? (pp. 177–204). Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. 1979 ‘Who reads novels? A symposium’ [contributor]. American Scholar, 48(2), Spring, 187–90. ‘Government and universities in the United States: The Eighth Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities: “Render unto Caesar . . .”: Government,

234 appendix society and the universities in their reciprocal rights and duties’. Minerva 17(1), Spring, 129–77. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Governments, foundations and the bias of research: Distortions of economic research’, by Theodore W. Schultz. Minerva, 17(3), Autumn, 459. ‘The order of learning in the United States: The ascendancy of the university’. In Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (eds), The Organization of Knowledge in America, 1860–1920 (pp. 19–47). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sound recording. ‘A New Declaration of Rights and Duties’ (Eighth Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities; lecture no. 3 recorded at the University of Texas at Austin, 3 May). Washington, DC: National Public Radio. One sound tape reel (59 min.). Copy in Brigham Young University Library. 1980 The Calling of Sociology and Other Essays on the Pursuit of Learning. Selected Papers of Edward Shils 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 498pp. Includes the following previously unpublished essays: ‘The confluence of sociological traditions’, ‘Learning and liberalism’, and ‘The legitimacy of social inquiry’. ‘Liberalism and the Jews: A symposium’ [contributor]. Commentary, 69(1), January, 66–9. ‘Observations on some tribulations of civility’. Government and Opposition, 15(3–4), Summer–Autumn, 528–45. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The Zipfel affair at the Free University of Berlin: Autonomy, publicity and the disruption of universities’. Minerva, 18(1), Spring, 132–5. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Academic freedom then and now: The DISMISSAL Of Leo Arons from the University of Berlin’. Minerva, 18(3), Autumn, 499–505. ‘The order of science and its self-understanding’. Review of A Guide to the Culture of Science, Technology, and Medicine, edited by Paul T. Durbin (New York: Free Press, 1980). Minerva, 18(2), Summer, 354–60. ‘Social ownership and the means of production’. Survey, 25(4), Autumn, 127–42. 1981 Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; London: Faber & Faber. 334pp. ‘Some academics, mainly in Chicago’. American Scholar, 50(2), Spring, 179–96.

appendix 235 Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The education of talented students’. Minerva, 19(3), Autumn, 480–1. 1982 The Constitution of Society. With a new introduction by the author. Heritage of Sociology series. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 383pp. Essays reprinted from The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (1972); Center and Periphery: Essays in (1982); Macrosociology (1975), and The Calling of Sociology and Other Essays on the Pursuit of Learning (1980). Edited with Hans Daalder. Universities, Politicians, and Bureaucrats: Europe and the United States. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. 511 pp. ‘The university: A backward glance’. American Scholar, 51(2), Spring, 163–79. ‘Reflections on the future of our learned institutions’. Cambridge Review, 103(29 January), 111–19. ‘Knowledge and the sociology of knowledge’. Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization, 4(1), September, 7–32. ‘The academic ethic’. Minerva, 20(1–2), Spring–Summer, 105–208. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘An innovation in German higher education: The private university’. Minerva, 20(1–2), Spring–Summer, 213. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Academic trade unions and the criteria of academic appointments at the University of Massachusetts’. Minerva, 20(3–4), Autumn–Winter, 339–43. Great Britain and the United States: Legislators, bureaucrats, and the universities. In Hans Daalder and Edward Shils (eds), Universities, Politicians, and Bureaucrats: Europe and the United States (pp. 437–87). Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 1983 ‘Tradition and the generations: On the difficulties of transmission’. American Scholar, 53(1), Winter 1983/84, 27–40. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘An achievement of academic citizenship: professors, government and the people of the Canton of Berne’. Minerva, 21(1), Spring, 101–2. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The constitution, academic selfgovernment and academic trade unions in American state universities and colleges: A decision of the United States Supreme Court’. Minerva, 21(2–3), Summer–Autumn, 296–7.

236 appendix Introduction to reports and documents: ‘On the criteria of academic appointment’. Minerva, 21(4), Winter, 410–14. ‘Lewis Mumford: On the way to the New Jerusalem’. New Criterion, 1(9), May, 38–44. ‘The academic ethic’. Newsletter of the International Council on the Future of the University. Foreword: The constitution of nationality. In Dominique Schnapper, Jewish Identities in France: An Analysis of Contemporary French Jewry, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (pp. ix–xvi). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Das Zentrum des Kosmos und das Zentrum der Gesellschaft. In Hans Peter Duerr (ed.), Sehnsucht nach dem Ursprung: zu Mircea Eliade (pp. 538–57). Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat Autoren- und Verlagsgezellschaft. Academic freedom and academic obligations. In Paul Kurtz (ed.), Sidney Hook: Philosopher of Democracy and Humanism (pp. 113–38). Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. 1984 The Academic Ethic: The Report of a Study Group of the International Council on the Future of the University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 104pp. Introduction to discussion: ‘The condition of humanistic education in the United States: Malign neglect’, by Hugh Lloyd-Jones. Minerva, 22(3–4), Autumn–Winter, 404. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Secrecy and freedom of communication in American science’. Minerva, 22(3–4), Autumn–Winter, 421–3. ‘The governability of modem societies’. Notes et Documents: Institut International J. Maritain, 9(7), July–September, 39–59. S. N. Eisenstadt: Some personal observations. In Eric Cohen, Moshe Lissak, and Uri Almagor (eds), Comparative Social Dynamics: Essays in Honor of S. N. Eisenstadt (pp. 1–8). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 1985 ‘Raymond Aron’. American Scholar, 54(2), Spring, 161–78. ‘En souvenir de Raymond Aron’. Commentaire, 8(32), Winter 1985/86, 1022–33. ‘How has the United States met its major challenges since 1945?’ Commentary, 80(5), November, 92–5. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Academic freedom and permanent tenure in academic appointments’. Minerva, 23(1), Spring, 96–100.

appendix 237 Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The morality of scientists’. Minerva, 23(2), Summer, 272–5. On the eve: A prospect in retrospect. In Martin Bulmer (ed.), The History of Empirical Sociology in Great Britain (pp. 165–78). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Raymond Aron, 1905–1983: A memoir. In Franciszek Draus (ed.), History, Truth, Liberty: Selected Writings of Raymond Aron (pp. 1–19). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sociology. In Adam Kuper and Jessica Kuper (eds), The Social Science Encyclopedia (pp. 799–811). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1986 The universality of science. In Heinz Maier-Leibnitz (ed.), Zeugen des Wissens (pp. 819–36). Mainz: Hase & Koehler. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Some reflections on the universities after the disturbances at the end of the 1960s’. Minerva, 24(1), Winter, 98–9. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Universities in the new states of Africa and Asia: The idea of the developmental university’, by James S. Coleman. Minerva, 24(4), Winter, 476. ‘Wissenschaft und Wissenschaftler’. Der Monat. Some observations on the place of intellectuals in Max Weber’s sociology, with special reference to Hinduism. In S. N. Eisenstadt (ed.), The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (pp. 427–52). New York: State University of New York Press. 1987 ‘Science and scientists in the public arena’. American Scholar, 56(2), Spring, 185–202. ‘More at home than out of step’. Review of Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century, by Sidney Hook (New York: Harper & Row, 1987). American Scholar, 56(4), Autumn, 577–86. ‘Problematic prophets’. Encounter, 69(5), December, 20–2. ‘Joseph Ben-David, 1920–1986’ [foreword to commemorative issue]. Minerva, 25(1–2), Spring–Summer, 1–2. ‘Joseph Ben-David: A memoir’. Minerva, 25(1–2), Spring–Summer, 201–5. Intellectuals. In Mircea Eliade (ed.) Encyclopedia of Religion (vol. 7, pp. 259–63). New York: Macmillan. Max Weber and the world since 1920. In Wolfgang Mommsen and Jurgen Osterhammel (eds), Max Weber and His Contemporaries (pp. 547–73). London: Allen & Unwin.

238 appendix With Morris Janowitz. Cohesion and disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II. In Morris Janowitz, Social Research and Armed Forces (pp. 1–48). Alexandria, VA: United States Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences. 1988 ‘Arnaldo Momigliano, 5 September 1908–1 September 1987’. American Philosophical Society Year Book, 215–29. ‘Citizen of the world: Nirad C. Chaudhuri’. American Scholar, 57(4), Autumn, 549–73. ‘The unknown Indian’. Encounter, 71(4), November, 64–7. ‘The community of learning: Arnaldo Dante Momigliano, 1908–1987’. Encounter, 71(5), December, 66–71. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The hierarchy of universities: The ranking of universities in the United States and its effects on their achievement’, by Norman M. Bradburn. Minerva, 26(1), Spring, 89–90. Introduction to discussion: ‘The academic profession and contemporary politics’. Minerva, 26(4), Winter, 575. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Affirmative action reaffirmed’. Minerva, 26(4), Winter, 598. ‘Totalitarians and antinomians: Remembering the 30s and 60s’. New Criterion, 6(9), May, 6–24. The limits of knowledge: An ideal and its diffusion. In Absolute Values and the Reassessment of the Contemporary World (pp. 25–38) New York: Paragon. Center and periphery: An idea and its career, 1935–1987. In Liah Greenfeld and Michel Martin (eds), Center: Ideas and Institutions (pp. 250–83). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Die Ausbreitung des europaischen organisierten Wissens. In Krzysztof Michalski (ed.), Europa und die Folgen: Castelgandolfo-Gesprache (pp. 185–229). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Max Weber und die Welt seit 1920. In Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schwentker (eds), Max Weber und Seine Zeitgenossen (pp. 743–76). Göttingen; Zurich: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht. The University of Chicago and the city of Chicago. In Thomas Bender (ed.), The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present (pp. 210–30). New York: Oxford University Press. Values and tradition. In Brenda Almond and Bryan Wilson (eds), Values. A Symposium (pp. 47–55). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International.

appendix 239 1989 Edited with biographical note. Arnaldo Dante Momigliano, 1908–1987. Chicago: University of Chicago. Memoir of Arnaldo Dante Momigliano. In Edward Shils (ed.) Arnaldo Dante Momigliano, 1908–1987 (pp. 14–17). Chicago: University of Chicago. Morris Janowitz, October 22, 1919–November 7, 1988. American Philosophical Society Year Book (pp. 201–7). ‘Liberalism: Collectivism and conservatism’. Chronicle of Culture, Spring, 12–15. ‘The limits on the capacities of government’. Government and Opposition, 24(4), Autumn, 441–57. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The discussion about proposals to change the western culture program at Stanford University’. Minerva, 27(2–3), Summer–Autumn, 223. ‘The modem university and liberal democracy’. Minerva, 27(4), Winter, 425–60. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Reflections on the obligations of honesty in the university’, by Sidney Hook. Minerva, 27(4), Winter, 505–6. ‘Arnaldo Momigliano and Max Weber’. Storia della Storiografia, 16, 54–64. ‘The sad state of humanities in America’. Review of The Culture We Deserve, by Jacques Barzun (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1989). Wall Street Journal, 3 July, 5. 1990 Edited with Hans Daalder, with a postscript to the Japanese edition). Daigaku Funsou no Shakaigaku (translation of Universities, Politicians, and Bureaucrats: Europe and the United States, 1982). Translated by Fujisaki Chieko and others. Tokyo: Gendai Shokan. ‘Robert Maynard Hutchins’. American Scholar, 59(2), Spring, 211–35. ‘Le buone maniere e il bene commune’. Biblioteca della Liberta, 25(III), October–December, 1–36. ‘Remembering the Congress for Cultural Freedom’. Encounter, 75(2), September, 53–65. ‘The limits on the capacities of governments’. Government and Opposition, 24(4), Autumn, 441–57. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Freedom of expression and disruptions at meetings of student societies in university buildings’. Minerva, 28(1), Spring, 91. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The progress of “affirmative action”: Yale declares itself’. Minerva, 28(2), Summer, 217–20.

240 appendix Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The university world turned upside down: Does confidentiality of assessment by peers guarantee the quality of academic appointment?’ Minerva, 28(3), Autumn, 324–34. ‘John Ulric Nef’. In John Ulric Nef, 1899–1988 (pp. 65–70). Washington, DC: privately printed. 1991 Lun Chuan Tung (translation of Tradition, 1981). Translated by Fu Keng. Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Press, 1991. 448pp. Edited with Ernst W. Böckenförde, with an introduction. Jews and Christians in a Pluralistic Society. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson in association with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna. Editor; with a foreword. Remembering the University of Chicago: Teachers, Scientists, and Scholars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 593pp. ‘Robert E. Park, 1864–1944’. American Scholar, 60(1), Winter, 120–7. ‘The virtue of civil society’. Government and Opposition, 26(1), Winter, 3–20. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Academic freedom at the University of Stockholm’, Minerva, 29(3), Autumn, 321–30. ‘Reflections on tradition, center and periphery and the universal validity of science: The significance of the life of S. Ramanujan’. Minerva, 29(4), Winter, 393–419. Was ist eine Civil Society? In Krzysztof Michalski (ed.), Europa und die Civil Society: Castelgandolfo Gespriiche (pp. 13–51), Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Academic freedom. In Philip G. Altbach (ed.), International Higher Education: An Encyclopedia (vol. 1, pp. 1–22). New York: Garland. Reflections on religious pluralism in civil societies. In Edward Shils and Ernst W. Böckenförde (eds), Jews and Christians in a Pluralistic Society (pp. 147–65). London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson in association with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna. Intellectuals and responsibility. In Ian Maclean, Alan Montefiore and Peter Winch (eds), The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals (pp. 257–306). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ernest W. Burgess. In Edward Shils (ed.), Remembering the University of Chicago (pp. 3–14). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robert Maynard Hutchins. In Edward Shils (ed.), Remembering the University of Chicago (pp. 185–96). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harry G. Johnson. In Edward Shils (ed.), Remembering the University of Chicago (pp. 197–209). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robert E. Park. In Edward Shils (ed.), Remembering the University of Chicago (pp. 383–98). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

appendix 241 Concluding remarks on Max Weber and East Asia. In Tu Wei Ming (ed.) The Triad Chord: Confucian Ethics, Industrial East Asia and Max Weber (pp. 414–26). Singapore: Institute of East Asian Philosophies. Die doppelte Last der Universittiten. In Hardy Bouillon and Gerard Radnitzky (eds), Die ungewisse Zukunft die Universiteit: Folgen und Auswege aus der Bildungskatastrophe (pp. 77–89). Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. The double burden of the universities as institutions of learning. In Hardy Bouillon and Gerard Radnitzky (eds), Universities in the Service of Truth and Utility (pp. 35–48). Frankfurt am Main; New York: Peter Lang. Henry Sumner Maine in the tradition of the analysis of society. In Alan Diamond (ed.), The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine (pp. 143–78). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A link in the apostolic succession. In Paul Kienle (ed.). Wie kommt Man auf einfaches Neues? Der Forscher, Lehrer, Wissenschaftspolitik und Hobbyknoch Heinz Maier-Leibnitz (pp. 54–6). Zurich: Edition Interfrom. 1992 ‘Citoyen et sociologue: François Bourricaud, 1923–1991’. Commentaire, 15(58), Summer, 434–6. ‘The universities, the social sciences and liberal democracy’. Interchange (Toronto) 23(1–2), 183–223. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Science in the Indian Universities’. Minerva, 30(1), Spring, 51–2. ‘The university of the twenty-first century: A symposium to celebrate the centenary of the University of Chicago’ [introductory note to issue containing papers from the symposium]. Minerva, 30(2), Summer, 129. ‘The service of society and the advancement of learning in the twenty-first century’. Minerva, 30(2), Summer, 242–68. ‘The situation of the universities in the twenty-first century’. Minerva, 30(2), Summer, 296–301. ‘The idea of the university: Obstacles and opportunities in contemporary societies’. Minerva, 30(2), Summer, 301–13. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘Old strains and new initiatives in the universities of the Federal German Republic’. Minerva, 30(3), Autumn, 422–3. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The progress of affirmative action: accreditation and diversity’. Minerva, 30(4), Winter, 531–4. Thirty years of Minerva. Minerva: Index to volumes 1–30 (1962–92), pp. iii–viii. With Roger Michener. Series Editors’ Foreword. In Edward C. Banfield (ed.), Civility and Citizenship in Liberal Democratic Societies

242 appendix (pp. vii–viii). New York: Paragon House. The ‘Series Editors’ Foreword’ also appears in the six subsequent volumes published in the Liberal Democratic Societies series (1992–95). Civility and civil society. In Edward C. Banfield (ed.), Civility and Citizenship in Liberal Democratic Societies (pp. 1–15). New York: Paragon House. The propaganda of the deed: An old device in a new form and in new circumstances. In Stanley Rothman (ed.), The Mass Media in Liberal Democratic Societies (pp. 19–35). New York: Paragon House. Universities since 1900. In Burton R. Clark and Guy R. Neave (eds), Encyclopedia of Higher Education (vol. 2, pp. 1259–75). Oxford: Pergamon Press. Le Società Liberaldemocratiche del ‘Melting Pot’: L’Immigrazione Giovanile nell Europa Contemporanea. In Renzo Gubert (ed.) I Giovani non Europe ed il Processo Díntegrazione: Per una Cultura della Tolleranza (pp. 29–37). Trento: Reverdito Edizione. Liberal democratic societies and the theory of the melting pot: European immigrant youth of today. In Luigi Tomasi (ed.), Non-European Youth and the Process of Integration: For a Tolerant Society (pp. 225–33). Trento: Reverdito Edizione, 1993 Etika Akademis (translation of The Academic Ethic, 1983). Translated by A. Nugroho. Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia. ‘Do we still need academic freedom?’ American Scholar, 62(2), Spring, 187–209. ‘Nazionalismo, nazionalità e società civile’. Bibloteca della Libertà, 28(123), October–December, 3–26. Introduction to reports and documents: ‘The British Universities under duress: Two essays by Professor Elie Kedourie’. Minerva, 31(1), Spring, 56. ‘Reflections on the teachers of undergraduates’. Minerva, 31(2), Summer, 211–27. Letter to Professor Walter Ruegg: On being a European. In Hinrich Seidel and Alison de Puymege-Browning (eds), Appreciation of Walter Ruegg: On the Occasion of His Seventy-fifth Birthday (pp. 27–31). Geneva: Standing Conference of Rectors, Presidents and Vice-Chancellors of the European Universities [CRE]. Die Beziehungen zwischen deutschen und amerikanischen Universitäten. In W. Hartwig and H. Brandl (eds), Deutschland Weg in die Moderne: Politik, Gesellschaft und Kultur im 19 (pp. 185–200). Jahrhundert. Gedenkschrift für Thomas Nipperdey, Munich: C. H. Beck.

appendix 243 La cultura delle comunità locali. In Le diversità regionali in Europa: il ruolo delle foro culture nella costruzione dell Unione Europea (pp. 123–40). (Trento: Regione Trentino Alto-Adige. Nazionalismo, nazionalità e società civile. In Piero Ostellino (ed.), Le libertii dei contemporanei: conferenze ‘Fulvia Guerrini’ 1884–1993 (pp. 223–51). Turin: Centro di Ricerca e Documentazione ‘Luigi Einaudi’. Max Weber und der russische Liberalismus. In Thomas Nipperdey, Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, and Hans-Ulrich Thamer (eds), Weltbürgerkrieg der Ideologien, Antworten an Ernst Nolte: Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag (pp. 73–83). Berlin: Propyläen. 1994 ‘Leopold Labedz’. American Scholar, 63(2), Spring, 239–57. ‘Do we still need academic freedom?’ Minerva, 32(1), Spring, 79–98. Introduction to discussion: ‘The universities between their internal and external enemies: Thoughts on Professor Conrad Russell’s academic freedom’. Minerva, 32(2), Summer, 186–7. ‘The British Universities in tribulation’. Minerva, 32(2), Summer, 200–19. ‘The career of Harold Laski’. Review of Harold Laski: A Life on the Left, by Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman (New York: Allen Lane; Penguin Press, 1993). New Criterion, 12(8), April, 24–30. ‘Nationalisme, nationalité et société civile’. La Revue Politique Indépendante. The sociology of Robert Park. In Renzo Gubert and Luigi Tomasi (eds), Robert E. Park and the ‘Melting Pot’ Theory (pp. 15–34). Trento: Reverdito Edizione. 1995 ‘Karl Mannheim’. American Scholar, 64(2), Spring, 221–35. ‘Academic freedom and permanent tenure’. Minerva, 33(1), Spring. ‘Nationality, nationalism and the idea of civil society’. Nationality, 1. ‘On the tradition of intellectuals: Authority and antinomianism according to Michael Polanyi’. Tradition and Discovery, 22(2), 1995/96, 9–26. The idea and practice of liberal democracy and the modern university, with some comments on the modem private university. In Roger Michener (ed.), The Balance of Freedom: Political Economy, Law, and Learning (pp. 107–82). New York: Paragon. La teoria della società della Scuola sociologica di Chicago. In Teoria sociologica ed investigazione empirica: La tradizione della Scuola sociologica di Chicago e le prospettive della sociologia contemporanea (pp. 60–75). Milan: Franko Angeli. The value of community’. In Luigi Tomasi (ed.), Values and Post-Soviet Youth: The Problem of Transition (pp. 69–81). Milan: Franco Angeli.

244 appendix 1996 Editor with Carmen Blacker, with an introduction. Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 292pp. The value of local community. In Luigi Tomasi (ed.), The Local Community (pp. 3–28). Milan: Franco Angeli. 1997 Portraits: A Gallery of Intellectuals. Edited with an introduction by Joseph Epstein. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The Virtue of Civility: Selected Essays on Liberalism, Tradition, and Civil Society. Edited with an introduction by Steven Grosby. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. The Calling of Education. Edited by Steven Grosby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The Order of Learning: Essays on the Contemporary University. Edited by Philip Altbach. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. The Calling of Education: The Academic Ethic and Other Essays on Higher Education. Edited by Steven Grosby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2006 A Fragment of a Sociological Autobiography: The History of My Pursuit of a Few Ideas, edited by Steven Grosby. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Collective Self-Consciousness and Rational Choice. In A Fragment of a Sociological Autobiography (pp. 195–216). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Note 1 Gordon B. Neavill and Christine C. Schnusenberg, ‘Bibliography of the Published Works of Professor Edward Shils’ (1997). School of Library and Information Science Faculty Research Publications. Paper 59. In Edward Shils, The Order of Learning: Essays on the Contemporary University (pp. 341–67). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/ slisfrp/59 (accessed 15 October 2017).

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references 259 ______. ([1980] 1997a) Observations on some tribulations of civility. In Shils 1997a, The Virtue of Civility (pp. 3–24). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. ______. (1980a). The Calling of Sociology: Essays on the Pursuit of Learning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ______. (1980b). Social science and social policy. In Shils 1980a, The Calling of Sociology (pp. 259–88). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ______. (1980c). The calling of sociology. In Shils 1980a, The Calling of Sociology (pp. 3–92). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ______. (1981a). Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ______. (1981b). ‘Some academics, mainly in Chicago’. American Scholar, 50, 179–96. ______. ([1982] 1997c). The academic ethic. In Shils 1997c, The Calling of Education (pp. 3–128). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ______. (1982a). The Constitution of Society: With a New Introduction by the Author. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ______. (1982b) ‘Knowledge and the sociology of knowledge’. Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization, 4(1), 7–32. ______. (1982c). Introduction. In Shils 1982a, The Constitution of Society (pp. vii–xxx). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ______. (1985). On the eve: A prospect in retrospect. In Martin Bulmer (ed.), Essays on the History of British Sociological Research (pp. 165–80). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ______. ([1987] 1997a). Max Weber and the world since 1920. In Shils 1997a (pp. 225–67). Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. ______. (1988a). ‘Center and periphery: An idea and its career, 1935 – 1987’. In Liah Greenfeld and Michel Martin (eds), Center: Ideas and Institutions (pp. 250–82). Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ______. (1988b). Values and tradition. In Brenda Almond and Bryan Wilson (eds), Values: A Symposium (pp. 47–55). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Prometheus Books. ______. (1991a). Henry Sumner Maine in the tradition of the analysis of society. In Alan Diamond (ed.), The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Sumner Maine (pp. 143–78). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ______. (ed.). (1991b). Remembering the University of Chicago: Teachers, Scientists, and Scholars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ______. (1992). ‘Idea of the university: Obstacles and opportunities in contemporary societies’. Minerva, 30 (Summer), 301–15. ______. (1995/96). ‘On the tradition of intellectuals: Authority and antinomianism according to Michael Polanyi’. Tradition and Discovery, 22(2), 9–26. ______. (1995a). ‘Karl Mannheim’. American Scholar, 64(2), 221–40. ______. ([1995b] 1997a). ‘Nation, nationality, nationalism and civil society’. Nations and Nationalism, 1(March), 93–118. Reprinted in Shils 1997a, The Virtue of Civility (pp. 188–224). Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press. ______. (1997a). The Virtue of Civility: Selected Essays on Liberalism, Tradition, and Civil Society, ed. Steven Grosby. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. ______. (1997b). The Order of Learning: Essays on the Contemporary University, ed. Philip Altbach. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

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Index

1960s 4, 5, 8, 19, 27, 29, 49, 89, 203–4, 206, 209–10 libertinism 135, 137 see also civil rights; Vietnam  

 

Aron, Raymond 1, 16, 118, 121n19, 124, 126, 127, 197–8 Atomic Scientists Movement 3, 4, 7 The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950) 3, 16–17, 127 authoritarian personality 33 ‘Authoritarianism “Right” and “Left” ’ (Shils 1954) 16, 127, 142 axial 21, 193  

 

 

academic ethic 6, 7, 136 ‘The Academic Ethic’ (Shils [1982] 1997) 202 Adler, Mortimer 200 Adorno, Theodor 4, 127 affirmative genealogy 48, 60n5 Africa 19, 209 Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Momigliano 1975) 193 American Journal of Sociology 49 American Imperialism 17, 20 American Sociological Association 9, 47, 195 American Sociological Review 49 The American University (Parsons and Platt 1973) 8 ‘America’s Paper Curtain’ (Shils 1952) 100 anti-Communism 187 ‘The Antinomies of Liberalism’ (Shils 1978) 22 anti-totalitarianism 27, 124–5 The Architecture of Community (Krier 2009) 61, 77 Arendt, Hannah 1, 28, 52, 124, 126–7, 134, 199 Arjomand, Said 19–20, 22, 30n8  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bacon, Francis 62 Balzan Prize (1983) 1 Barboza, Amalia 113, 120n11, 121n15 Becker, Howard 9 Bellah, Robert 193 Bellow, Saul 1, 5, 11, 30n5, 52, 60n2, 197–8 Bemis affair 195 Ben-David, Joseph 48 Berger, Peter L. 194 Berlin, Isaiah 51, 123, 124, 126, 199 ‘Beyond Nihilism’ (Polanyi 1960) 104n11 Birnbaum, Norman 4 Blacker, Carmen 11 Blau, Peter 5 Bloom, Allan 1, 52, 197, 200 Blum, Leon 15 Blumer, Herbert 9 Bourdieu, Pierre 23–4 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 1, 49, 82, 84–6, 92, 95, 100, 105n15, 204, 207 Bulmer, Martin 49  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

index 265 Bürgerlichegesellschaft 155 Burgess, Ernest 52, 195  

‘The Calling of Sociology’ (Shils 1961) 5, 25, 33, 54 calling of sociology 32, 34–5, 59 Calvin, Melvin 102n5 Cambridge, University of 194, 196, 203, 213 see also Peterhouse Cambridge Journal 125 Cambridge Women (Shils and Blacker 1996) 196 Career of Distinguished Scholarship award (1986) 48 ‘The Case for Collective Research’ (Bernal 1949) 84 Center and Periphery (Shils 1975) 37 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 17–18, 184 centre 5, 12, 19, 23, 25, 43–4, 131–2, 148–9, 209 centre/periphery 8–9, 23, 33, 46n3, 49, 56, 59, 148, 151–2, 154, 187 charisma 4–5, 8–9, 12, 23, 33, 57, 72–4, 81, 115, 154 Chaudhiri, Amit 11 Chicago, University of 1–6, 8–11, 14, 15, 19, 27, 29, 46n8, 48, 52–3, 58, 61, 134, 137, 181–2, 186, 191–204, 207, 209, 213 Polanyi and 80, 81, 85, 93, 96–7, 99–100, 105n16 see also Committee on Social Thought Chicago School of Sociology 53, 60n3, 192, 195 Chirot, Daniel 192 Christian sociology 195 citizenship 20, 145, 163–5, 191 civic nationalism see nationalism civil politics 20, 148–9, 171, 173, 185 civil rights 164, 204 civil society 6, 25, 74–5, 78n7, 117, 135, 138, 140–2, 144–7, 150–2 civil ties 5, 20, 40, 45, 167  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

civility 6, 13, 26–9, 30n5, 39, 42, 49, 51, 116–17, 119, 131, 133, 135, 154–7, 173, 189n7, 189n9 ‘Observations on some Tribulations of Civility’ (Shils 1980) 121n19 see also ‘Ideology and Civility’ The Civilizing Process (Elias 2000) 140 Cold War 16–17, 19, 49, 189, 204 see also ideologue, intellectual collective self-consciousness 9, 24, 34, 38, 79, 131, 143–4, 146–8, 151–2, 157–9, 169 collectivity 12, 13, 43, 146, 157, 163 see also liberalism, territoriality Collins, Randall 192 Committee on Social Thought 1, 3, 6, 7, 10, 52–3, 99, 124, 200, 203 Communist 1, 14–16, 18, 105n17, 124, 177, 187, 189n4, 204 complexities 25, 30n9, 125, 213 Comte, August 63, 103n10 Congress for Cultural Freedom 4, 7, 17–18, 60n5, 101n4, 125, 189 consensus 4, 8, 33–6, 38, 42, 50, 61, 70, 79, 101n3, 128, 130, 145–6, 171, 185 Constant, Benjamin 130 conviviality 26, 42, 46n9, 79–80, 89, 94, 101n2 Cooley, Charles Horton 5, 52, 56, 185 The Counter-Revolution of Science (Hayek 1952) 16, 64 ‘A Critique of Planning—The Society for Freedom in Science’ (Shils 1947) 84 Cuddihy, John Murray 140  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dawson, Christopher 51 ‘Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criticism of Mass Culture’ (Shils 1957) 107 de Man, Hendrik 2, 171, 175–80 decolonization 3, 5, 19, 22 deference 13, 23, 49, 59, 131, 142, 212 Democracy in America (Tocqueville 1835) 154  

 

 

 

 

 

266 index Depression, the 2, 9, 50, 177, 180–2, 200, 209 Dewey, John 15, 52 Die Gegenwartsaufgaben der Soziologie (Mannheim 1932) 114 Dilthey, Wilhelm 181 The Division of Labour (Durkheim 1893) 170n3 The Dual State (Fränkel 1941) 182 Duneier, Mitchell (Slim's Table 1992) 11, 27 Durkheim, Émile 9, 54, 57, 149, 160, 162–3, 167–8, 170n3, 173, 197  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Economy and Society (Weber [1921] 1978) 33, 64, 78n3 education 11, 34, 45, 57, 71, 73, 75, 111, 132–3, 196, 200 Shils’ 9, 173–80 Edyvane, Derek 140 Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 12, 48, 55 Eliade, Mircea 1, 52 Elias, Norbert 120n10, 140, 150 Eliot, T. S. 3, 51, 77n2, 87–8, 103n9, 123–4, 128, 137 elitism 177, 198 Encounter 1, 4, 7, 17, 18 ‘The End of the Ideological Age?’ (Aron 1968) 118 ‘The End of Ideology?’ (Shils 1955) 118, 119 end of ideology 27, 106, 115–16, 173 see also ideology ‘The English and the Continent’ (Polanyi 1943) 88, 104n11 Epstein, Joseph 11, 193, 194, 196, 198–9 Erikson, Erik 6  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flaubert, Gustave 171, 173–4, 178, 179, 186, 189n1 Ford Foundation 17, 18, 99, 189 Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service 3, 184 Foucault, Michel 20, 51 A Fragment of a Sociological Autobiography (Shils 2006) 37, 79, 110, 119, 120n3 Fränkel, Ernst 182, 183 Frankfurt School 3, 24, 65 freedom 18, 29, 34, 41–3, 83, 88, 111, 113, 117, 127–8, 131–3, 137, 150, 169n1, 175, 209 academic 139, 208, 210–11 freedom of science 82, 84, 204 see also Congress for Cultural Freedom: Society for Freedom in Science; ‘A Critique of Planning— The Society for Freedom in Science’ ‘Freedom in Science’ (Polanyi 1950) 84, 85  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geertz, Clifford 4, 20 Geisteswissenschaften 44, 46 Gellner, Ernst 51, 169 Gemeinschaft 32, 33 Gemeinschaftliche 33, 36, 39, 41, 108, 141, 158, 160, 162, 167, 186 Gesellschaft 24, 32–3, 36, 41, 46n8, 110, 141, 158, 162, 167, 187, Gifford Lectures (Polanyi) 83, 85, 92–4, 98, 99 Goldhamer, Herbert 14 Gordlan, Torsten 189n5 Grene, David 52, Grene, Marjorie 80, 81, 93, 97–100 Grosby, Steven 24–5, 80, 101n3, 126, 161, 168 ‘The Growth of Thought in Society’ (Polanyi 1941) 84, 91  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘false consciousness’ (‘falsche Bewußtsein’) 23, 113, 177 Fanon, Franz 21–2 Fascism 15, 16, 51, 65, 124, 127, 134, 177, 180, 182, 193, 209 The Fatal Conceit (Hayek 1988) 78n6  

 

 

 

 

Habermas, Jürgen 24, 51 Harvard 3–4, 48, 55, 188, 196, 200  

 

index 267 Hayek, F. A. 1, 16, 51, 63–4, 78n6, 84, 91, 97, 103n10, 123, 125, 127–8 Hegel, Georg 112–13, 130–1, 155 Heidegger, Martin 15, 111 historicism 112–13, 126 Hobbes, Thomas 11, 131, 141, 175 Hobbism 13, 24 Hook, Sydney 6, 28, 118, 198 humanism 48, 55, 60 Humanitas 91–2, 95 Humboldt, W. von 35, 138, 210 Humboldtian university 136, 181, 202, 207, 208 Hutchins, Robert Maynard 2–3, 99, 194, 198, 199–200, 203  

 

 

 

 

 

Kelsen, Hans 16, 111 kinship 20, 28, 33, 39–40, 42–3, 51, 95, 161, 163, 165, 167–8 Knight, Frank H. 2, 3, 9, 15, 22, 26, 36, 38, 46n8, 53, 63, 79, 110, 181, 191–2, 195, 200 Kürwille 32, 41  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ideal type 156, 164, 193 ideological politics 44, 117, 124–5, 142, 146, 148, 150, 166, 173 Ideologie und Utopie [Ideology and Utopia] (Mannheim [1929] 1936) 106, 109–12, 114, 121n16 ideology 6, 16, 26–8, 49–51, 59, 60n5, 78n6, 124, 126–7, 142, 148, 150, 166, 173, 185 ‘The Concept and Function of Ideology’ (Shils 1968) 114 ‘Ideology and Civility’ (Shils 1958) 51, 116, 124, 142 India 4, 19, 189, 194, 208–10 intellectual life 6, 28, 61, 188, 202 intellectuals 1–7, 10, 14, 16–19, 21–3, 28–9, 46, 51, 53, 59, 103n9, 104n11, 107–9, 113, 117–19, 124, 138, 149, 151–2, 191–3, 195, 209 public 132–3, 197 ‘The Intellectuals and the Powers’ (Shils 1958) 20, 114, 172  

 

 

 

 

Labedz, Leopold 197–8 Laski, Harold 123–4, 197–9 Lasswell, Harold 24, 53, 195–6 Lazarsfeld, Paul 5–6 Lebensphilosophie 42–3 Le Bon, Gustav 175, 179 liberal democracy 16, 18, 51, 147, 154, 183, 185 liberal order 136, 187 liberalism 22–3, 26–7, 35, 42, 71–2, 76, 83, 89, 91–2, 127–8, 135, 138, 144, 182 liberal tradition 6, 10, 23, 44, 74–5, 185 libertinism 135–7 Locke, John 11, 16, 129, 138, 141, 189n6 London School of Economics (LSE) 3, 8, 10, 19, 51, 84, 90, 109, 123–4, 186, 191–2, 196, 203, 213  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Janowitz, Morris 184–5 Jefferson Lectures (Shils 1979) 1, 45, 213 Jewkes, John 90, 97, 102  

 

 

MacDonald, Dwight 4, 7 Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (Mannheim [1929] 1940) 2, 15, 125, 181 Manchester, University of 3, 81–3, 87, 88, 90–1, 95–7, 100, 102, 104n11, 213 Mannheim, Karl 2, 3, 9, 21, 26, 65, 82, 84–8, 91, 102n7, 125, 134, 181–3, 194, 212, see also Ideologie und Utopie; Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction; Moot Marx, Karl 111, 134, 141, 175, 196 Marxism 10, 14, 50, 54, 107–8, 110, 111, 113, 115–16, 119, 121n19, 174–9  

 

 

 

 

 

Kant, Immanuel 110–12 Kasson, John F. 140, 150  

 

268 index McCarthyism 28, 59, 81, 100, 105n17, 119, 189n7, 204 meritocracy 203, 206 Merton, Robert K. 4–6, 8, 14, 25, 47–8, 50, 53–5, 57–8, 60n4 The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Weber, 1949) 197 methodology 23, 193 Michels, Robert 171, 174–9 Minerva 1, 5, 10, 12, 30n5, 102, 194, 202, 205, 207–8, 213 modernity 6, 19, 21, 50, 58, 89, 103n10, 117, 126, 130, 134, 160, 163–5, 185 modernization 19–22, 50, 60n5, 72–6, 206 Momigliano, Arnaldo Dante 7, 193, 195, 199 Moodey, Richard 97, 102n7 The Moot 26, 85, 87–8, 102n8 Mont Pelerin Society 91, 92 Morgenthau, Hans J. 12, 16, 27 Mosca, Gaetano 176, 179  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pareto, Vilfredo 54, 176, 179, 197 Park, Robert E. 2, 9, 26, 44, 52–3, 60n3, 79, 108, 181, 192, 195, 197 Parsons, Talcott 3–6, 8–9, 14, 19–20, 24–5, 30n8, 33–4, 47–51, 53–5, 57–8, 60n4, 97, 160, 188–9, 196–7, 212 Pennsylvania, University of 2, 9, 173, 180–1, 202 periphery see centre/periphery Personal Knowledge (Polanyi 1958 [PK]) 46n9, 79, 92, 94 personal relations 1, 23, 26, 40 Peterhouse, Cambridge 191–2, 194, 196, 203 planning 15, 20–1, 84, 88, 91, 110, 125–7, 179, 186 pluralism 4, 28, 39–46, 127, 189n7 Polanyi, Magda 80–1, 86, 105n16 Polanyi, Michael 2–3, 10, 16, 26–7, 30n8, 46n9, 64, 129, 186 see also Chicago Political Parties (Michels 1911) 174, 176 ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (Weber [1918] 1946) 155, 182 Pooley, Jefferson 28–9, 60n5, 109, 120n8, 123 Popper, Karl 16, 26, 44, 82–3, 91, 124–6, 131, 134 Portraits: A Gallery of Intellectuals (Shils 1997) 29, 30n5 positivism 8, 54, 63 postcolonialism 19–22, 173 post-critical philosophy 93, 99 practices 26, 27, 49, 52, 63, 67–70, 72, 88, 128, 130–1, 141 pragmatism 52, 197 Present State of American Sociology (Shils 1948) 188 primary group relations 3, 5, 12, 13 ‘Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties’ (Shils 1957) 36, 127 primordial, personal, sacred and civil ties 33, 40, 42, 45, 144, 150–1  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

nation 28, 33, 209 nation-state 20, 28, 149, 164–5, 168 national identity 28, 157–8, 162 Nationalism Studies 167, 169 nationalism 28, 142, 154, 172, 177, 185 nativist 16, 17, 27, 187 Nazism 15, 16, 18, 184 Nef, John U. 195, 197 Neumann, Franz 182, 183  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oakeshott, Michael 14, 16, 27, 62, 117–18, 146 Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 184 Oldham, J. H. 85, 87–9, 98, 101n2 ‘On the Proper Use of Ideologies’ (Aron 1977) 118 Origines de la France contemporaire (Taine 1875–1893) 174 Otto, Rudolph 2, 5, 9 ‘Ought Science to be Planned? The Case for Individualism’ (Polanyi 1949) 84  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

index 269 primordial, the 9, 12–13, 20, 24, 29, 39, 40, 43, 49, 80, 145, 158–9, 161–9, 199 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1930) 192, 197 Psychology of Socialism (de Man 1926) 2, 174, 177  

 

 

Settlement movement 194–5 Simmel, Georg 44, 58, 108, 110, 149, 181, 192 Slim's Table (Duneier 1992) 27 Small, Albion 195 Smith, Adam 39, 141 Smith, Anthony 162, 167–9 Social Democratic Party 14, 176, 177 Soc Sci II 1, 3, 11 social science 2–3, 11, 17, 26, 44, 46, 49, 55, 64, 70, 75, 134–5, 164, 188, 192–4, 196, 200, 203, 207 and Polanyi 95, 97–9 social order 13, 26, 38, 50, 57, 73, 84, 137, 171–2, 176, 178, 183–4, 186 social theory 23–4, 48, 51, 140, 192, 197 socialism 15–16, 175–9, 187, 199 sociological theory 2, 8, 25, 55–7, 130–1, 141 sociology 4–9, 23–4, 32–9, 50–7, 59, 97, 130, 136, 192–4, 198 American 10, 25, 48–9, 50–2, 188 UK 203, 206 women in 11, 195, 196 see also Chicago sociology of knowledge 17, 21, 108, 111–13, 121n15, 194 solidarity 101n3, 130, 141, 160–3, 167, 173, 179, 184 Sombart, Werner 108, 113, 180 Sorel, Georges 2, 171, 174–80, 183, 187–8 Speier, Hans 3, 7, 14–15, 182, 183 ‘The Stability of Beliefs’ (Polanyi 1952) 83 Stalinism 15, 16, 85 state, the 15, 35, 40, 43–5, 71–2, 127, 141–2, 146, 155–8, 160, 163–5, 167, 169n1 and the university 29, 45 welfare 16, 56, 74 see also nation-state Stolper, Toni 90, 97, 103n10 Strauss, Leo 27, 127, 128, 134, 198, 200  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

rational choice 24, 40 ʻRationalism in Politics’ (Oakeshott 1947) 16, 123 rationality 46, 62, 63, 74, 76 Reflections on Violence (Sorel 1908) 174, 187 religion 9, 35, 37–8, 40–1, 43, 57, 59, 69, 117–18, 163, 167, 172, 193–5, 199 ‘Render unto Caesar: Government, Society, and Universities in their Reciprocal Rights and Duties’ (Shils 1979) 6 research universities 204, 207 respectability 24, 27, 85, 134, 136–8 responsibility 91, 92, 111, 138, 152, 155–6, 210 Road to Serfdom (Hayek 1944) 16, 125  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

sacralization 25, 48, 59 sacred, the 4–5, 9, 12–13, 20, 24, 33, 40, 42–3, 45, 57, 59, 67, 76, 144, 151, 171–3, 179, 189, 192–3, 213 ‘Salvation by Science’ (Polanyi) 98 Schmitt, Carl 15, 27–8, 115, 117, 121n16, 144, 147, 183 Science, Faith, and Society (Polanyi 1946 [SFS]) 64, 83–4, 129 science policy 10, 202, 208 ‘Scientific Convictions and the Free Society’ (Polanyi 1950) 85, 92 scientism 10, 25, 64, 103n10, 117, 129, 188, 213 Second World War (World War II) 20, 48–50, 54, 65, 77n2, 107, 171, 176, 192, 204, 206 Sektengesellschaft 155, 156, 168  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

270 index structural functionalism 49, 50, 60n5 The Structure of Social Action (Parsons 1937) 25, 53, 54, 197 Szilard, Leo 1, 10, 80, 197, 198, 200

University of Chicago see Chicago; Hutchins ‘unmasking’ (‘Enthüllung’) 113, 177

Taine, Hippolyte 171, 174–5, 178 Talmon, Jacob 124, 127, 133 Tawney, R. H. 11, 16, 175 territoriality 158–9, 161–2, 168 Third World 4, 19, 209 ties see civil; primordial; sacred Tocqueville, Alexis de 35, 141, 154–5, 157, 169n1, 174, 189n2 Tönnies, Ferdinand 2, 5, 32–3, 39, 108, 120n5, 158 The Torment of Secrecy (Shils 1956) 4, 22, 27, 82, 119, 189n7, 204 Toulmin, Stephen 1, 6 Toward a General Theory of Action (Parsons and Shils 1951) 8, 33, 44, 188 tradition 6, 8, 10, 12, 15–16, 19–23, 25–6, 28–9, 33–5, 37, 41–2, 49, 51, 56, 58, 85, 88, 93, 103n9, 108, 117, 128–33, 152, 154, 161, 172, 177, 191–4, 199 Tradition (Shils 1981) 61 ‘Tradition and Liberty’ (Shils 1958) 71, 75, 128 transcendence 23, 25, 158, 173–4, 197, 213 transcendental orders 12, 175 Troeltsch, Ernst 111–13 Turner, Bryan 29, 112, 121n16 Turner, Stephen 50–2, 102n7, 107, 123–4, 177, 212–13

values 4, 8, 20–3, 25, 43–5, 48, 58–9, 64, 77, 79, 88, 91, 103, 127, 145, 148, 159–60, 172, 210 plurality of 123, 126 value freedom see Weber, Max, value freedom value neutrality 193 Vietnam 19, 204 ʻThe Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankindʼ (Oakeshott 1962) 126 voluntary associations 71, 72, 74, 156 von Schelting, Alexander 2, 182

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Unemployment and Money: The Principles Involved’ (Polanyi film) 89 University, the 5, 7, 45, 192–3, 200 the idea of 29, 132–3, 136, 139 see also Cambridge; Chicago; Manchester; Pennsylvania  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weber, Alfred 107 Weber, Max 2–3, 8–9, 11, 29, 33–4, 56, 98, 101n4, 111–14, 159–61, 165, 176–7, 182–3, 191–5, 198, 201, 206–7, 210, 212 charisma 5, 72, 115 ideal type 156, 163–4 and religion 38, 57, 199, 213 and tradition 64, 66, 72–4 value freedom 113 Verantwortungsethik (ethic of responsibility) 155–6 Vereinswessen (associational life) 155 see also nation-state Wehrmacht 5, 59, 184 Weimar 14, 16, 27–8, 52, 177, 182–3, 185 Wesenwille 32, 33, 41 Whitehead, Alfred N. 55, 58 Wirth, Lewis 2, 4, 9–10, 23, 52–3, 60n4, 106, 108–9, 120n3, 181–2, 200 World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace (1948) 18