Recovering the Thought of Edward Shils

This article provides an extended review of The Calling of Social Thought, a collection of essays about the thought of social theorist Edward Shils. The article includes preliminary observations about Shils’ life and work, brief summaries of the essays included in the collection, and several suggestions aimed at encouraging additional study of Shils’ writings.

Edward Shils as Stranger, Social Thought as Vocation

This essay is a response to Struan Jacobs, “Recovering the Thought of Edward Shils,” which is an extended review of Adair-Toteff and Turner’s The Calling of Social Thought. It considers Edward Shils as a “stranger,” in the sense defined by Georg Simmel, relative to contemporary sociology. Christian Smith’s claim that American sociology is implicitly pursuing a “sacred project” is invoked, in contrast with Shils’ vision for consensual sociology. The expansion by CST to “Social Thought” as a calling (vocation), and its ties to science as understood by Polanyi, are strongly affirmed.

The Human Face of Knowledge

This is a brief response to comments by Struan Jacobs and Peter Blum on The Calling of Social Thought, Rediscovering the Work of Edward Shils, a recent collection of essays edited by Christopher Adair-Toteff and Stephen Turner. It identifies a distinctive contribution of Shils to the larger problem of the tacit.

Shils and the Intellectuals

This chapter traces Edward Shils' distinctive conception of the intellectual—as indispensable to, but all too often an opponent of, social order. Shils’ 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 late 1950s. The chapter reconstructs Shils’ encounter with the downcast intellectual, first as a precocious reader of Gustave Flaubert, Hippolyte Taine, 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 World War II, the moral ideal seemed spent even within socialist movements, Shils observed its traces in the complaints of ex-radicals. Society’s loose consensus depends on public belief, he argued, which in turn depends on the social picture put forward by intellectuals. These ‘persons with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred’ could help support the fragile achievements of civil politics, but Shils was not optimistic.

The Chicago School goes East: Edward Shils and the dilemma of the Indian intellectuals, circa 1956–67

The sociologist Edward Shils (1910–95) is a neglected commentator on modern India. Best known in a South Asian context for his involvement in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Shils also produced an influential study on Indian intellectuals, published in 1961. He was one of the few non-Marxists to write about the role of intellectuals during the era of decolonization in Asia and Africa. His book appeared in the same year as Frantz Fanon's Les Damnés de la Terre (1961) and a year before C. L. R. James's Marxism and the Intellectuals (1962), just as Pan-Africanism was finding its ideological voice. This article recovers Shils’ work on the Indian intellectual. It describes his Indian interlocutors, his methodology, and his claims about the isolated and ineffectual character of the Indian academic elite. The article concludes with an examination of the longer-term influence and validity of Shils’ critique of the Indian intelligentsia.

TALCOT PARSON AND ROBERT K MERTON

Sepanjang kariernya yang panjang, Talcott Parsons adalah kontributor produktif untuk literatur sosiologis. Kepentingan-Nya berkisar jauh dan luas. Dalam kerangka umum teori grand masyarakat, ia berurusan dengan subsistem, peran, urutan normatif, dan interpretasi situasi oleh aktor-aktor sosial. Pada saat-saat yang berbeda, ia menjelajahi masalah sosiologi medis, perkembangan sosial kepribadian, ekstremisme politik, universitas, dan kekeluargaan. Karya-karyanya: Struktur Aksi Sosial (1937), Sistem Sosial (1951), Menuju Teori Umum Aksi (dengan Edward Shils, 1951), Struktur Sosial dan Kepribadian(1964), dan Sistem Modem Societies (1971). Secara keseluruhan, Parsons mengembangkan sistem teoritis berpusat konseptual dalam kesetimbangan, universalities evolusi, dan identifikasi properti yang umum untuk semua masyarakat. Dalam teorinya, evolusi sosial sejajar evolusi biologis, dengan masyarakat modem membuktikan lebih besar "kapasitas adaptif umum" dari yang sebelumnya (1971: 2-3). Dengan demikian, masyarakat tidak kurang suatu sistem daripada rekan-rekan biologis dan alami.