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

By Manchester University Press

Edward Shils was a central figure in twentieth century social thought. He held appointments both at Chicago and Cambridge and was a crucial link between British and American intellectual life. This volume collects essays by distinguished contributors which deal with the major facets of Shils’ thought, including his relations with Michael Polanyi, his parallels with Michael Oakeshott, his defense of the traditional university, his fundamental philosophical anthropology, and his important work on such topics as tradition, civility, and the nation. As an introduction to this complex and original thinker, it will be of interest to scholars and students in a number of fields, including sociology and social theory, but also to anyone interested in the intellectual life as it was lived in the mid-twentieth century, in the face of the Cold War and ideological struggle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526120076

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The calling of social thought

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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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by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

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

Introduction: discovering and rediscovering Shils

Stephen P. Turner

1 The philosophical anthropology of Edward Shils

Steven Grosby

2 The sociologist as human scientist: the meaning of Shils

Thomas Schneider

3 The recovery of tradition

Lenore T. Ealy

4 Edward Shils and Michael Polanyi: the terms of engagement

Phil Mullins

5 Shils, Mannheim, and ideology

Christopher Adair-Toteff

6 Shils and Oakeshott

Efraim Podoksik

7 Edward Shils on pluralism and civility

Richard Boyd

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

Peter Mentzel

9 Shils and the intellectuals

Jefferson Pooley

10 Edward Shils and his Portraits

Bryan S. Turner

11 Edward Shils: defender of the traditional university

Philip G. Altbach

12 Concluding comments: Edward Shils – the ‘outsider’

Christopher Adair-Toteff

Appendix: Bibliography of the published works of Professor Edward Shils

Christine C. Schnusenberg and Gordon B. Neavill

References

Index

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 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 post-communism, 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).

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 Comm­ittee 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 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 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 attitudes about academic