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,...
...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...
...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...
...It seems desultory and untidy...
...D.O.H., St...
...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...
...They want to grasp the truth about man and nature...
...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...
...But Ph.D's renew, too...
...Excellently written, too...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...the former is not...
...As to politics, White, a part-time farmer, doesn't accept government lime, on principle...
...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...
...White is a reluctant master...
...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...
...This is a big book--662 pages of letters, all by White--and we readers learn a good deal about our man...
...Sociology, that most exotic and pretentious and suspicious of the sciences, whose name invites thinlymasked scorn or at least sharp, quizzical looks...
...h e James Grant is an associate editor of Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly...
...Anda lot more...
...Paul, Minn...
...Most sensible data-packed publication on the market...
...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...
...his son, Joel, has a degree in naval architecture from MIT and runs a boatyard in North Brooklin...
...and they go about it in much the same way...
...The essential error of scientism is to confuse what he calls the logic of discovery with the logic of demonstration...
...The Germans are setting down to practicing the only type of energy conservation that makes sense--cutting the waste, not the use, of energy...
...Still, writing lies heavy on White's mind, and words haunt his letters...
...White Edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth / Harper & Row / $15.00 James Grant E.B...
...It seems fitting, then, that he who is both artist and sociologist has finally turned his attention to the relation between the two...
...They plunged in anyway, using their imaginations to help understand things, relying on art when science would not do...
...He writes beautifully, yet dreads writing, and is, therefore, a star and guide to every writing man...
...Furthermore, as individual artists and artistic epochs have characteristic styles, so do sociologists and the periods in which they work...
...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...
...Like cotton...
...the exploration of the unknown and, far from least, the interpretation of physical and human worlds...
...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...
...Published by Dr...
...Nisbet devotes the in'st chapter of his book to a discussion of this thesis about the unity" of the creative act...
...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...
...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...
...The above is an excerpt from the December 1976 issue of ACCESS TO ENERGY...
...I f Pulitzer Prizes were given on an unbiased basis to outspoken and authoritative journals, one certainly would be given to ACCESS TO ENERGY...
...Thanks to a project called AGROTHERM, run by a number of West German power companies...
...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...
...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...
...As a letter writer, White is in his glory, saying the words...
...his stepson is Roger Angell, who turns baseball into poetry in the New Yorker, White has an ulcer...
...All science, natural as well as social...
...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...
...Thank you for your many courtesies," White tells Harold * The New Yorker, April 28, 1928...
...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...
...The founders of sociology didn't have this problem...
...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...
...The project made him miserable...
...he chooses not to fly...
...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...
...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...
...It took Shakespeare to compare a special someone to a summer's day...
...Nisbet is a sociologist with common sense and uncommon intelligence and artistry...
...Not that he's opposed to science...
...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...
...Imagine-sociology as an art form...
...The latter is concerned mostly with rules, prescriptions, and methodology...
...On the contrary, both artist and scientist are concerned "with the illumination of reality...
...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...
...Send to: The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1977 29...
...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...
...the whole chapter is a pastiche of quotations from art historians, philosophers, and historians of science...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Petr Beckmann, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, it is written for the layman...
...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...
...Even pineapple crops are being tried in the once-cold soil of Germany...
...But Nisbet worries that modern sociology has nearly forgotten its roots...
...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...
...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...
...he once picked up James Joyce's Ulysses, but the book made him nervous, and he put it back down...
...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...
...while a student at Cornell, he tried to cross the Fall Creek Gorge in Ithaca on the handrail of the Stewart Avenue bridge...
...Sociology thus devolves into the science of small ideas, and sociologists into bite-size thinkers...
...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...
...He was a New York Giants fan, in their day, and wears Brooks Brothers shirts, which are too long in the sleeves...
...This newsletter is an incisive, tell-it-as-it-is journal that is fast developing a nationwide following...
...Here Nisbet could have discoursed a little more, for he pays scant attention to Durkheim, whose style consequently never quite takes shape...
...That, Friends of the Earth, is "thermal pollution...
...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...
...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...
...And eggplant...
...briefly underwent psychoanalysis...
...And art provided means not only of understanding, but also of representing reality...
...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...
...I enlcose $9...
...BOOK REVIEW Letters of E.B...
...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...
...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...
...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...
Vol. 10 • April 1977 • No. 7
