The Order of Learning considers the problems facing higher education by focusing on main underlying factors: the relationship of higher education to government, academic freedom, and the responsibilities of the academic profession, among others. Edward Shils argues that higher education has a central role in society, and that distractions, such as pressures from government, disinterest of students and faculty in education, and involvement of institutions of higher learning in social questions, have damaged higher education by deflecting it from its commitment to teaching, learning, and research. Shils believes that the modern university must be steadfast in its commitment to the pursuit of truth, the education of students, and the provision of research. Universities should not be all things to all people. On one hand, the academic community must understand the essential mission of the university and resist distractions. On the other, government must provide the necessary support to higher education, even when the immediate "pay-off" is not self-evident. This book provides a refreshing new perspective precisely by taking a traditional stance on the role of higher education in modern society. It includes carefully researched and elegantly written essays on many of the central issues facing education today. This work will be of great interest to educators and students alike, as well as those interested in the future of higher education in the United States.

The Order of Learning considers the problems facing higher education by focusing on main underlying factors: the relationship of higher education to government, academic freedom, and the responsibilities of the academic profession, among others. Edward Shils argues that higher education has a central role in society, and that distractions, such as pressures from government, disinterest of students and faculty in education, and involvement of institutions of higher learning in social questions, have damaged higher education by deflecting it from its commitment to teaching, learning, and research.

Shils believes that the modern university must be steadfast in its commitment to the pursuit of truth, the education of students, and the provision of research. Universities should not be all things to all people. On one hand, the academic community must understand the essential mission of the university and resist distractions. On the other, government must provide the necessary support to higher education, even when the immediate "pay-off" is not self-evident.

This book provides a refreshing new perspective precisely by taking a traditional stance on the role of higher education in modern society. It includes carefully researched and elegantly written essays on many of the central issues facing education today. This work will be of great interest to educators and students alike, as well as those interested in the future of higher education in the United States.

The Order of Learning considers the problems facing higher education by focusing on main underlying factors: the relationship of higher education to government, academic freedom, and the responsibilities of the academic profession, among others. Edward Shils argues that higher education has a central role in society, and that distractions, such as pressures from government, disinterest of students and faculty in education, and involvement of institutions of higher learning in social questions, have damaged higher education by deflecting it from its commitment to teaching, learning, and research. Shils believes that the modern university must be steadfast in its commitment to the pursuit of truth, the education of students, and the provision of research. Universities should not be all things to all people. On one hand, the academic community must understand the essential mission of the university and resist distractions. On the other, government must provide the necessary support to higher education, even when the immediate "pay-off" is not self-evident. This book provides a refreshing new perspective precisely by taking a traditional stance on the role of higher education in modern society. It includes carefully researched and elegantly written essays on many of the central issues facing education today. This work will be of great interest to educators and students alike, as well as those interested in the future of higher education in the United States.

Edward Shils was one of the giants of sociological theory in the period after World War II. In this autobiography, written three years before his death in 1995 and never before published, Shils reflects on the remarkable range of his life's work and activities, including founding and editing the journal Minerva, being a central figure in the Congress of Cultural Freedom, serving as a founding member of the editorial board of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and being a member of the International Council on the Future of the University.Shils recognizes that a unity of concern runs through his many theoretical writings and activities. Early in his life the concern was expressed as understanding the character of consensus. During the last fifteen years of his life, he refined his understanding of consensus through investigation of the nature of "collective self-consciousness." That concern was the structure and character of the moral order of a society, and, in particular, liberal, democratic society. Accompanying the autobiography are two unpublished essays, "Society, Collective Self-Consciousness and Collective Self-Consciousnesses" and "Collective Self-Consciousness and Rational Choice," two areas of intellectual concern discussed in the autobiography. The book contains fascinating discussion of many of the people Shils knew throughout his illustrious career: Robert Park, Louis Wirth, Talcott Parsons, Karl Mannheim, Michael Polanyi, Audrey Richards, Karl Popper, Robert Merton, and many others.The volume represents Shils' final formulations on the character of society and its moral order. As such, it is a most important contribution both to the history of the social sciences in the twentieth century and to sociological theory.

Edward Shils was one of the giants of sociological theory in the period after World War II. In this autobiography, written three years before his death in 1995 and never before published, Shils reflects on the remarkable range of his life's work and activities, including founding and editing the journal Minerva, being a central figure in the Congress of Cultural Freedom, serving as a founding member of the editorial board of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and being a member of the International Council on the Future of the University.

Shils recognizes that a unity of concern runs through his many theoretical writings and activities. Early in his life the concern was expressed as understanding the character of consensus. During the last fifteen years of his life, he refined his understanding of consensus through investigation of the nature of "collective self-consciousness." That concern was the structure and character of the moral order of a society, and, in particular, liberal, democratic society. Accompanying the autobiography are two unpublished essays, "Society, Collective Self-Consciousness and Collective Self-Consciousnesses" and "Collective Self-Consciousness and Rational Choice," two areas of intellectual concern discussed in the autobiography. The book contains fascinating discussion of many of the people Shils knew throughout his illustrious career: Robert Park, Louis Wirth, Talcott Parsons, Karl Mannheim, Michael Polanyi, Audrey Richards, Karl Popper, Robert Merton, and many others.

The volume represents Shils' final formulations on the character of society and its moral order. As such, it is a most important contribution both to the history of the social sciences in the twentieth century and to sociological theory.

In these vivid portraits of prominent twentieth-century intellectuals, Edward Shils couples the sensitivity of a biographer with the profound knowledge of a highly respected scholar. Ranging as widely across various disciplines as Shils himself did, the essays gathered here share a distaste for faddists who "run with the intellectual mob" and a deep respect for intellectuals who maintain their integrity under great pressure.
Highlights include an affectionate treatment of Leo Szilard, the physicist whose involvement with the development of the atomic bomb led him to work ceaselessly to address its social consequences; a discussion of the educational philosophy of Robert Maynard Hutchins, the University of Chicago's fifth and most controversial president; an appreciative account of the Polish emigre Leopold Labedz's well-informed and outspoken resistance to Communism; and an essay about the extraordinary Indian writer Nirad Chaudhuri.
Many of these essays have appeared in "The American Scholar," edited by Joseph Epstein, who introduces this volume with his own portrait of Edward Shils.
"Though professionally a sociologist, Edward Shils was a man of wide cosmopolitan culture and experience, greatly concerned with the public problems of his time: in particular with those created by the rise of new and dangerous ideologies, the frightening possibilities of science, and the apparent abrogation of public responsibility by many Western intellectuals."--Hugh Trevor-Roper
The late Edward Shils was a member of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought for forty-five years and a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge University. His many books include "The Calling ofSociology" and "The Intellectuals and the Powers," both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Throughout his long career, Edward Shils brought a wide knowledge of academic institutions to discussions about higher education. "The Calling of Education" features Shils's most incisive writing on this topic from the last 25 years of his life. The first essay, "The Academic Ethic," articulates the unique ethical demands of the academic profession and directs special attention to the integration of teaching and research. Other pieces, including Shils's renowned Jefferson lectures, focus on perennial issues in higher learning: the meaning of academic freedom, the connection between universities and the state, and the criteria for appointing individuals to academic positions. Edward Shils understood the university as a great symphonic conductor comprehends the value of each instrument and section, both separately and in co-operation. "The Calling of Education" offers Shils's insightful perspective on problems that are no less pressing than when he first confronted them.

Edward Shils (19101995) was one of the leading intellectual defenders of freedom in the twentieth century. Learned in history, politics, literature, economics, theology, and legal history, he taught for many years at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought and at Peterhouse College, Cambridge. In these nine essays, Shils explores the importance of civility and tradition to a free society. The essays' significance is enormous, for Shils was one of the first and assuredly one of the most courageous writers to examine the natures of civility and civil society and their relation to a free, ordered, liberal democratic society. As H. R. Trevor-Roper has written, "Deeply concerned for the Western values of rationality, freedom, and progress, Shils was dismayed by the threat which they now faced: the threat posed by the absolute individualism into which Western Liberalism had degenerated." Among the essays are "Tradition and Liberty: Antinomy and Interdependence," "Max Weber and the World Since 1920," and "The Modern University and Liberal Democracy."

Mannheim, a pioneer in the field of SOCIOLOGY (740), here analyzes the ideologies that are used to stabilize a social order and the wish-dreams that are employed when any transformation of that same order is attempted. Translated and with a Foreword by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils; Preface by Wirth; Indices.

Edward Shils's attempt to work out a macrosociological theory which does justice both to the spiritual and intellectual dispositions and powers of the mind and to the reality of the larger society is an enterprise that has spanned several decades. In his steps toward the development of this theory he has not proceeded deductively; rather he has worked from his own concrete observations of Western, Asian, and African societies. Thus, despite the inevitable abstractness of marcrosociological theory, the papers in this volume--which have been published separately since the Second World War--have a quality of vivid substantiality that makes the theoretical statements they present easier to comprehend.
Professor Shils has attempted to develop a theory that has a place for more than those parts of society that are generated from the biological nature of human beings and those parts that are engendered by the desires of individuals, acting for themselves or for groups and categories of individuals, to maintain and increase their power over other human beings and to secure material goods and services for themselves. He has argued that there are constituents of society in which human beings seek and cultivate connections with objects that transcend those needed to satisfy biological necessity and the desire for material objects and power over others. This third stratum of social existence, he concludes, cannot be reduced to the other two and cannot be disregarded in any serious attempt to understand the function of any society. Thus Edward Shils, without disregarding its many valuable achievements, has nevertheless parted ways with much of modern sociology.
For this collection of papers the author has written an introductory intellectual autobiography that places each essay in the setting of the development of his thought and that connects it with his other writings.

"Tradition," by esteemed sociologist Edward Shils, was the first book to fully explore the history, significance, and future of tradition as a whole. Intent on questioning the meaning of the antitraditionalist impulse in today's society, Shils argues here that the tendency to distrust and rebel against tradition is at the heart of tradition itself; only through suspicion and defiance does tradition actually move forward. Revealing the importance of tradition to social and political institutions, technology, science, literature, religion, and scholarship, "Tradition "remains the definitive work on this vital element of our society.
"Shils is a man of fabled learning, whose mind purrs powerfully like the moth at dusk. I hesitate to use the word "conservative" of him because it misses the central concern of his work, which is not conservatism, but the conservation of those human resources and achievements which are richest, and matter most."--David A. Martin, "Times Literary Supplement
"""Tradition" is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject that encompasses the totality of tradition in all its multifaceted variables and functions. . . . It is a landmark analytical and theoretical sociological study that not only fills a need but also provides a basic model and impetus for further research."--H. Leon Abrams Jr.," Sociology
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Originally published in 1982, this is a collection of studies by representatives of countries in western Europe, writing about important legislation affecting universities and showing trends of government control over higher education. In the 1960s European universities faced two major challenges: a rapid increase in enrolment, with consequent expansion of staff and a growing need for money; and a demand for changes in their governing structures by student activists and some staff and government administrators. Taking the widespread student agitation in 1968 as the starting-point, the authors summarise the general history of higher education; events of the late 1960s and 1970s and their political and public consequences for educators; and the then current positions of stage and private universities in their countries. In addition, one chapter contrasts the situations in Great Britain and the United States. Hans Daalder provides a retrospective overview of these problems and their resolutions.

Edward Shils's The Torment of Secrecy is one of the few minor classics to emerge from the cold war years of anticommunism and McCarthyism in the United States. Mr. Shils's "torment" is not only that of the individual caught up in loyalty and security procedures; it is also the torment of the accuser and judge. This essay in sociological analysis and political philosophy considers the cold war preoccupation with espionage, sabotage, and subversion at home, assessing the magnitude of such threats and contrasting it to the agitation by lawmakers, investigators, and administrators so wildly directed against the "enemy." Mr. Shils's examination of a recurring American characteristic is as timely as ever. "Brief...lucid... brilliant." American Political Science Review. "A fine, sophisticated analysis of American social metabolism." New Republic. "An excitingly lucid and intelligent work on a subject of staggering importance...the social preconditions of political democracy." Social Forces."

This is a collection of portraits of twelve outstanding women who lived and worked in Cambridge during the century before women were admitted fully to membership of the University. The subjects include Jane Harrison, distinguished scholar of Greek religion, Mrs Sidgwick, founder of Newnham College, Eileen Power, medieval historian, Nora Chadwick, scholar of Norse and Celtic, Honor Fell, cell biologist and founding force behind the Strangeways Laboratory, Frances Cornford, poet, and Rosalind Franklin, whose work on DNA was essential to the Watson-Crick model. All were outstanding personalities as well as distinguished scholars, and the 'twelve portraits' give a vivid account of their lives and work.

To celebrate the intellectual achievement of the University of Chicago on the occasion of its centennial year, Edward Shils invited a group of notable scholars and scientists to reflect upon some of their own teachers and colleagues at the University, those who formed the second and third generation of teachers, and who made important contributions to science and scholarship.

This third volume of the Selected Papers of Edward Shils brings together ten essays, three of which have never been published before and all the others of which have been completely revised and elaborated. They deal with the history of American and European sociology as an intellectual undertaking and as a means to the attainment of practical ends. Professor Shils's main themes are the influence of ethical and practical intentions on scholarly study in the social sciences, the autonomy of the intellectual tradition of sociology, and the significance of the institutional organization of sociological teaching and research.