Sociology as an Art Form
Kesler, Charles R.
BOOK REVIEW Sociology as an Art Form Robert Nisbet / Oxford / $7.95 Charles R. Kesler Two things distinguish Robert Nisbet from other sociologists: what he says is usually fresh, interesting,...
...That is to say, it is manifestly impossible to distill Das Kapital or The Protestant Ethic and the Sp~m't of Capitalism from a treatise on scientific method...
...All science, natural as well as social...
...And eggplant...
...Anda lot more...
...Yet it is Nisbet's intent, not only in this volume but in his many others, to show that sociology is not a remote intellectual flight of fancy, that it is a humane discipline close to the experience of Western man over the last two centuries, that it is a vital part of the West's cultural and intellectual heritage...
...His book can be thought of, he avers, "as a kind of prophylaxis against, not science, but scientism, which is science with the spirit of discovery and creation left out...
...Like cotton...
...His "Sloth," an essay, begins: "As the year (1933) goes into its dying phase, the thing that most distresses us is the paucity of our literary output...
...For fifty years, he has stewed about his o u t p u t - - v e r s e , essays, c h i l d r e n ' s books, and the redoubtable Elements of Style, with William Strunk, J r . Once he wrote a poem about not writing, titled "Ballad of Little Faith...
...he once picked up James Joyce's Ulysses, but the book made him nervous, and he put it back down...
...Even as Dickens created remarkable portraits of characters like Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby, so the sociologists crafted portraits of such types as the bourgeois, the worker, and the bureaucrat...
...This last point, the unity of the creative act in art and science, is now largely conceded, especially in the light of Jacob Bronowski's fine essays on the subject in Science and Human Values and his other works...
...Anthony Harrigan in SENSING THE NEWS ACCESS TO ENERGY is the best single concise source of up-to-the-minute facts-facts to confound the anti-science, antitechnology, anti-free enterprise demagogy of the eco-freak doom-criers...
...h e James Grant is an associate editor of Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly...
...More then that, it is fun to read...
...he's opposed, rather, to the corruption of science...
...It's all very interesting, but hardly new...
...The Germans are setting down to practicing the only type of energy conservation that makes sense--cutting the waste, not the use, of energy...
...ACCESS TO ENERGY is a pro-science, pro-technology, pro-free enterprise monthly newsletter, now in its fourth year of technical enlightenment, opposition to government interference in free markets, and the exorcism of environmental Prophets of Doom...
...The above is an excerpt from the December 1976 issue of ACCESS TO ENERGY...
...BOOK REVIEW Letters of E.B...
...We now have a full blown Fascist movement underway," White declared in 1965, with a nod toward Governor Wallace, yet in more than a hundred pages of letters written during the Vietnam era, he never mentions the war...
...His letters show that he disowned World Federalism not long after his editorials endorsing universal government appeared in the New Yorker, at the close of the Second World War...
...and they go about it in much the same way...
...This same issue also contained articles on the progress of geothermal energy, on the disposal of nuclear wastes, onthe pros and cons of coal, and a commentary on the nuclear ballot results in recent state elections...
...The project made him miserable...
...This newsletter is an incisive, tell-it-as-it-is journal that is fast developing a nationwide following...
...As to politics, White, a part-time farmer, doesn't accept government lime, on principle...
...It also suggests the great influence the aesthetic may have on the scientific, as in the case of Copernicus, who embraced heliocentrism not for any superiority it possessed in explaining the movements of the heavens--for initially it had no such superiority--but simply because of its beautiful simplicity...
...They want to grasp the truth about man and nature...
...he chooses not to fly...
...The conversation today," White wrote his wife, Katharine AngeU, from Washington, "reminded me a little of the early New Deal period when Wallace was talking about one God and one king-and it all seems so far removed from the people, who are full of tiny faults and virtues and whose name is Schmaltz and Henderson...
...Not that he's opposed to science...
...He was a New York Giants fan, in their day, and wears Brooks Brothers shirts, which are too long in the sleeves...
...Petr Beckmann, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, it is written for the layman...
...It is a great mistake, Nisbet argues, radically to separate science and art, to believe that science is confined to the rather dreary search for truth, while art exists to express the beautiful or indulge our emotions or tantalize us with verisimilitude...
...The founders of sociology didn't have this problem...
...Certainly Sociology as an Art Form, whose 139 pages are filled with the lively thoughts of one sociologist about the living thoughts of others, is a step in the right direction...
...This is a big book--662 pages of letters, all by White--and we readers learn a good deal about our man...
...The essential error of scientism is to confuse what he calls the logic of discovery with the logic of demonstration...
...They were, rather, creations of imaginative intellects, open to art as well as science, who sought determinedly to make sense out of the great changes rolling over European society...
...Sociology thus devolves into the science of small ideas, and sociologists into bite-size thinkers...
...In general, for extended treatment of any of these figures one must consult his earlier work, The Sociological Tradition, which is excellent, except that its treatment of Marx is decidedly ungenerous...
...Published by Dr...
...By redirecting attention to these men, and by reconsidering the very nature of sociology, Nisbet may help restore a little life, in all senses of the word, to contemporary sociology...
...Sociology, that most exotic and pretentious and suspicious of the sciences, whose name invites thinlymasked scorn or at least sharp, quizzical looks...
...Excellently written, too...
...Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel--the discipline's seminal thinkers--never balked at attacking a problem because they couldn't immediately and "scientifically" verify their conclusions...
...Footnotes, far from distracting, would have been welcome, not 28 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1977 only to guide further reading, but to stiffen his claims that quantitative studies and modern research have sharply qualified some of the hypotheses and artistic visions of these grand thinkers...
...Yet the current preoccupation with method persuades many sociologists that " a small idea abundantly verified is worth more than a large idea still insusceptible to textbook methods of Verification...
...I f Pulitzer Prizes were given on an unbiased basis to outspoken and authoritative journals, one certainly would be given to ACCESS TO ENERGY...
...Paul, Minn...
...Nisbet devotes the in'st chapter of his book to a discussion of this thesis about the unity" of the creative act...
...Send to: The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1977 29...
...But Nisbet worries that modern sociology has nearly forgotten its roots...
...Other than these few and rather precise little paragraphs, into which we pour the slow blood of our discontent, we never get around to writing anything at all, in a world when not to write is considered i r r e g u l a r . " Dorothy Lobrano Guth, White's godchild and editor of this marvelous collection of letters, observes that White is the least literary of men, that he commutes to the world of books, but lives at his farm in North Brooklin, Maine...
...Most sensible data-packed publication on the market...
...I enlcose $9...
...his son, Joel, has a degree in naval architecture from MIT and runs a boatyard in North Brooklin...
...That is, even as, say, CEzanne painted landscapes, so these men created sociological landscapes in the form of Tocqueville's reflections on democracy and the coming to power of the masses, or Marx's picture of the rise of industrial capitalism, or Simmel's urban panorama in Metropolis and Mental Life...
...D.O.H., St...
...Of course, this isn't a complete description of the creative act, but it does point to the importance for science of the creative imagination...
...That, Friends of the Earth, is "thermal pollution...
...In the days following Pearl Harbor, White was summoned to Washington to help prepare a pamphlet explaining Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, which needed all the help they could get...
...It took Shakespeare to compare a special someone to a summer's day...
...that in its blind preoccupation w i t h making i t s e l f more and more scientific, it has given up trying to be more and more creative...
...Imagine-sociology as an art form...
...his stepson is Roger Angell, who turns baseball into poetry in the New Yorker, White has an ulcer...
...White is a reluctant master...
...It reads, in part: When I sit down with proper zeal To write the play I really feel Gird on the pen With strength of ten And try to do some thinking I find it's time to pay a call Or put the laundry in the hall Or kiss a maid Or build my trade Or do a little drinking...
...White Edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth / Harper & Row / $15.00 James Grant E.B...
...BOOK REVIEW Sociology as an Art Form Robert Nisbet / Oxford / $7.95 Charles R. Kesler Two things distinguish Robert Nisbet from other sociologists: what he says is usually fresh, interesting, and important--no multi-volume studies of California communes for him--and what he says is always said well, with handsome style and refreshing directness--no abstruse Parsonian ramblings or ponderous Hegelian musings, either...
...As cooling water leaves electric generating plants, it is piped into the German soil with amazing results: Corn grows 3 feet taller, potatoes mature 4 weeks sooner, and the sugarbeet crop increases by 70...
...the exploration of the unknown and, far from least, the interpretation of physical and human worlds...
...On the contrary, both artist and scientist are concerned "with the illumination of reality...
...Sometimes it takes a genius to discern this likeness: for instance, it took Isaac Newton to connect a falling apple to the planets circling the sun, and to elaborate the connection in the theory of gravity...
...Politics isn't White's best subject, but the love of plain expression and Henry David Thoreau, whom he knows by heart, rescue him from most philosophical scrapes...
...Nevertheless, the central point is that none of these marvelous creations--the sociological landscapes and portraits by Weber, Marx, and the others, which in one way or another have directed sociological inquiry ever since--none of these originated in a sedulous attentiot~ to scientific method or were, at least for many years, scientifically verifiable...
...He writes beautifully, yet dreads writing, and is, therefore, a star and guide to every writing man...
...As a letter writer, White is in his glory, saying the words...
...But Ph.D's renew, too...
...LIBERTARIAN REVIEW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To" ACCESS TO ENERGY Box 2298-A, Boulder, CO 80302 Enter my subscription to ACCESS TO ENERGY for one year (12 monthly issues...
...while a student at Cornell, he tried to cross the Fall Creek Gorge in Ithaca on the handrail of the Stewart Avenue bridge...
...Even pineapple crops are being tried in the once-cold soil of Germany...
...the whole chapter is a pastiche of quotations from art historians, philosophers, and historians of science...
...Thanks to a project called AGROTHERM, run by a number of West German power companies...
...They plunged in anyway, using their imaginations to help understand things, relying on art when science would not do...
...But the point he so belabors, the point about the psychological roots of art and science, is important to the book's principal theme, which is that while sociology is undeniably a science, it is also partly an art...
...Thank you for your many courtesies," White tells Harold * The New Yorker, April 28, 1928...
...It seems desultory and untidy...
...In fact, what he is concerned with in Sociology as an Art Form goes deeper than that, for his theme is the basic unity of science and art...
...Still, writing lies heavy on White's mind, and words haunt his letters...
...And art provided means not only of understanding, but also of representing reality...
...briefly underwent psychoanalysis...
...The latter is concerned mostly with rules, prescriptions, and methodology...
...According to Bronowski, the creative act, for artist and scientist, consists in the discovery of a hidden likeness in two or more aspects of nature...
...Here Nisbet could have discoursed a little more, for he pays scant attention to Durkheim, whose style consequently never quite takes shape...
...the former is not...
...It seems fitting, then, that he who is both artist and sociologist has finally turned his attention to the relation between the two...
...Some chronology would also have been helpful to the general reader in fixing exactly what were the various styles of sociology, when they appeared, and how they developed...
...Furthermore, as individual artists and artistic epochs have characteristic styles, so do sociologists and the periods in which they work...
...Nisbet is a sociologist with common sense and uncommon intelligence and artistry...
Vol. 10 • April 1977 • No. 7
