Edward Shils

Edward Shils (1910-1995)
Author(s): JEAN FLOUD and LORD DACRE

Source: Minerva, Vol. 34, No. 1 (March 1996), pp. 85-93
Published by: Springer
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Minerva 34: 85-93, 1996.
© 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in The Netherlands .
Edward Shils (1910-1995)*

I
JEAN FLOUD
I first met Edward Shils in 1946-47. We were colleagues at the Londo

School of Economics where he had been appointed reader and I, assist
lecturer in the Department of Sociology. I confess that I judged him harshl
as an abrasive and unhelpful colleague. He did not teach even-handedl
He took up students he thought bright and worthwhile, then un
emoniously dropped them - dumped them, in fact, into the lap of jun
colleagues. He would breeze into my room, fling a file on the desk and
with a jovial air which did nothing to mitigate the offence, "Here, you
good teacher, see what you can do with this one".
Much more important, however, it seemed to me that he did too littl
support the then still dominant but already threatened conception of
subject as resting on a great European tradition. This was the conceptio
which I had been bred as an undergraduate in the 1930s at the fee
Morris Ginsberg and T.H. Marshall. Admittedly, by 1946 it seemed to
getting dusty and backward-looking and students were becoming resti
but it was a conception to which Shils himself subscribed with some feeling
When I later reproached him with the suggestion that, given this fact and
reader in the department, he might have thought to inject some life into i
I got something like the dusty answer that he had better things to do
that anyway, the cause was lost. (Actually, he was wrong about the l
cause. He left in 1950 when the tide was about to turn. As Ralf Dahrendorf
records in his history of the LSE, the department as he himself knew it as a
student in the 1950s and 1960s was attractive and lively - which is not to say
that it might not have been even more so had Edward in his time with us
entered sympathetically into our concerns.)
So it was that it took me a decade to arrive at a proper appreciation of
Edward Shils. His great learning, prodigious memory and the breadth and
seriousness of his professional interests were, of course, there for the
looking; less obvious were his virtues of character - his warmth, humanity
and capacity for sympathy and compassion. Once persuaded, however, I
became what I have ever since remained - a most grateful intellectual
beneficiary and affectionate friend.
' Addresses given at a service in remembrance of Edward Shils, fellow of Peterhouse

1970-78, honorary fellow 1979-95, at the Church of St Mary the Less, Cambridge, on 10 June,
1995.
86 Jean Floud
I want to say something about his work - not much, of course, but enough
to convey a sense of his intellectual mission, his seriousness of purpose, his
originality and unconventionality as a sociologist.
He once wrote of Karl Mannheim that he was "a thoroughgoing
sociologist - he hated individualism, he held not only that the individual
was a frail reed but that he scarcely existed as a thinking reed". Well - if
Mannheim was in this sense a thoroughgoing sociologist, Edward Shils was
most certainly not such a one.
The range of his professional interests was very wide and he was a
prolific writer. I shall confine myself to what I believe to be his most
important and enduring work. This concerns intellectuals and their institu-
tions, especially the universities, in both modern and developing societies.
How did he arrive at this central and lasting preoccupation?
In a rare few pages of autobiography he recounts how in his youth he was
an avid reader of nineteenth-century French, English and Russian litera-
ture, and of "a vast amount" of nineteenth-century political, philosophical
and belletristic writings. He found himself asking the question, "Why all
these writers, historians, philosophers and other intellectuals - some great
and all interesting" felt such revulsion from their societies? This is, as the
saying goes, "a good question". But why should it have occurred to
Edward? Evidently he was a natural, a congenital, an instinctive conserva-
tive, who urgently desired those whom he admired or found interesting to
contribute positively to the making of a harmoniously ordered civil society.
But the reason for this turn of mind must lie buried in his personal history.
For many years, his early, dispassionate formulation of the question was
overlaid by his own revulsion, not for his own society, but for its
intellectuals. During the 1930s, he recalls, "I witnessed with revulsion the
rush of the Gadarene intellectuals in the U.S. and Europe into the arms of
their respective Communist parties. I saw and did not like the silliness,
dishonesty and self-deception of some of the best educated and the most
cultivated, and many of the half-educated of several generations".
The tragic interlude of the Weimar Republic in Germany, which he
experienced vicariously through close friends among the refugee intellec-
tuals, saddened him. Wistfully, knowingly unjustly, he held them respon-
sible for failing to prevent the destruction of a society which, it seemed to
him, had provided them with an environment in which they could have
flourished and fulfilled the high calling which, following Max Weber, he
attributed to them.
Weber was his inspiration and probably the most abiding influence on
him. (He once told me he often dreamt, on completing a piece of work,
that Weber would pat him on the shoulder and say, "Well done my boy!")
He spoke of Weber's famous lecture "Science as a Vocation", delivered in
1919 to an audience of university students in Munich, as "one of the
Edward Shils (1910-1995) 87
deepest and most moving confessions of faith in the value

scholarship, coupled with a tragic awareness of their limits"
him in a flash what it was that from his youth had fir
dismayed and eventually disgusted him about the attitudes
to their own societies.
Weber provided him with the definition of their calling
standard by which to judge them and their institutions.
II
After Weimar, and during the war, he lowered his sights and thought of
intellectuals in the meagre role of "a saving remnant, a leaven". But
immediately after the war, through old Weimar friends (in particular, the
Hungarian-born American scientist, Leo Szilard), he fell in with a very
different breed of intellectual - the atomic scientists in the United States.
"They impressed me", he wrote, "with their remarkable sense of civic
responsibility and goodwill towards mankind." He entered with enthusiasm
into their campaign for international control over atomic energy and for
civilian control over its domestic development. He barnstormed (his term)
with them and was co-founder of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Characteristically, he made good use of his collaboration with them to
observe them and reflect on his original question. By no means all
intellectuals were disaffected. The capacity of intellectuals "for folly and
malevolence" ceased to be the focus of his concern. His terms of reference
were broadening.
By the late 1950s, he had developed an agenda for the comparative study
of the relations between intellectuals and the governing authorities ("the
powers"). Tension between them, he argued, was inevitable, given "the
constitutive orientation of intellectuals toward the sacred" ("their preoc-
cupation and contact with the most vital facts of human and cosmic
existence"), which engendered self-regard and "an implied attitude of
derogation" towards others engaged in more mundane activities. Neverthe-
less, "an effective collaboration between the intellectuals and the author-
ities that govern society is a requirement for order and continuity in public
life and for the integration of the wider reaches of the laity into society". It
was the task of the statesman and the "responsible" intellectual to discover
and achieve the optimum balance of civility and intellectual creativity; and
it fell to the sociologist to study the diverse patterns and the institutional
and cultural concomitants of consensus and dissent between them.
"Responsible" intellectuals were those constitutionally disposed or enabled
by clarity of thought and force of character to keep their sights firmly on
the Holy Grail of Truth.
Edward certainly saw himself in these terms as an intellectual, and a
responsible one to boot. But he was conspicuously lacking any false pride in
his calling. He reserved his scorn for follow intellectuals who betrayed the
ideal by lapsing into ideology or - still worse - ideological politics.
88 Jean Floud
At LSE he developed what

American life". He took adv
numbers of graduate studen
Empire to get to know the f
wealth - especially of India.
I used to go to Indian restauran
would find myself at the same
role they would take in the i
preoccupied. I imagined them
wondered what would become
would be able to overcome the
which many of them seemed to
He decided in 1955 to visit In

than a decade. In 1961, he pu
between Tradition and Mode
rarely expressed capacity fo
youthful ideals - indeed, for
Years later, recalling his ti
crossfire of tradition and
disappeared altogether from m
comfortable in the travail th
Ill
As to the universities, he was,

German university in its gre
Marianne Weber's biography
Brentano, Wilamowitz-Moe
early origin of his enthusiasm
to the Museum of Middle-eas
vania; he noticed from the la
were in Berlin.
Experience in a number of o
attacks
on universities in the U
evidently important quest
exercised him, to the proper
would enable them to meet
founded Minerva as a unique
affairs and a forum for high
policy (in the widest sens
humanities and social scienc
His editorship of Minerva s
indiscriminate expansion of t
students and then teachers
intellectuals and the unive
government. In 1979 he deliv
"Government and the Universities", taking as his text Chris

Pharisees: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which
and unto God the things that are God's", saying that he wo
set forth an interpretation of what things are Caesar's an
belong, if not to God, then to that sphere of human strivin
ideal of intellectual contact with the ultimate order of existence is
cultivated".
Edward responded to Weber's manifesto "Science as a Vocation" with a
passion and dedication that was self-consciously religious. In introducing
the Jefferson lectures, he declared "The effort to achieve understanding of
the order or pattern of existence constitutes a sphere which is as close as
many of us can come to the sphere of the divine". He would not, I am sure,
have claimed to have come very close to that sphere (notwithstanding his
unselfconscious and, to his friends, incongruous inclusion of the present
Pope John Paul II among their number). He had dedicated himself, in his
own words, to "the quest for truthful understanding as one of the grandest
and worthiest activities to which a human being can engage in this life".
In a perceptive assessment of his work in 1981, Julius Gould - also
formerly a colleague at LSE - remarked of his recently published collected
papers that they covered "not just a ruminative, often remorseless pursuit
of truth about serious things. TTiere is also a sense of unfinished business".
Edward worked on, indefatigably for another 14 years but, needless to say,
the sense of unfinished business was never dissipated. In his last years he
was acutely conscious of working against time. He leaves behind a rich and
diverse body of published and as yet unpublished work of notable orig-
inality - and the inspiring example of a fine sociologist with an intellectual
mission.
II
LORD DACRE
The name of Edward Shils is not to be found in Who's Who or

the usual directories of prominent persons. This can hardly be
inadvertence. Though so active in the public world of learning,
think, a very private person, not very easy to know. I count it as on
rewards of my interesting and varied experience as Master of Pe
that it gave me the opportunity to know him and become his frie
He was of course already known to me by repute. As a f
Professor John U. Nef, the American historian of the British Coal In
I had learned about the Committee on Social Thought of which b
founder members. I had been involved, from an early date,
Congress for Cultural Freedom and its somewhat controversial h
90 Lord Dacre
which he played a part, and

Encounter ; Preuves, Cuade
Peterhouse that I came to k
was formed intellectually in
Peterhouse became his other
station for missionary journ
It would be presumptuous in me to speak of his professional work as a

sociologist. Others can do that. I will merely note that he came to that study
from outside, and rather late; which perhaps, in general, is no bad thing.
Sociology is a subject for graduate, not undergraduate study: it requires a
base of general education. But at the State University of Pennsylvania Shils
did not take a graduate course. After his first degree in liberal arts he
became a social worker in Philadelphia. Did that practical experience start
him off? Was that "field-work" at the "grass-roots" the source of his later
interest in "the primary group", that lowest compact body in organised
society? I do not know. However that may be, it was at the University of
Chicago, to which he was afterwards attracted, that he discovered his
vocation, there that the statue was found in the block of marble. And
indeed, in what better school could it be found? Was it not in a sausage-
factory in Chicago that the greatest of modern sociologists, Max Weber,
had received the illumination which led him to his most famous work? Shils
was a great admirer of Max Weber and would collaborate with Talcott
Parsons, the American high-priest of Weberism, who rendered the doctrine
of the Master so much more obscure in English than it had been in
German. Shils began his career as a sociologist by translating the works of
German scholars - Weber, Mannheim, Ernst Frankel and others. In
Chicago he was in good company: many able sociologists were working
there, creating a distinct tradition, more German-oriented, less respectful
of classical liberalism than in the universities of the East Coast - the
tradition which would be reflected in the Committee on Social Thought,
founded by President Hutchins after the Second World War.
But meanwhile there had been that war. During it, Shils had served in
the American army and had been attached to the British army. He was a
member of OSS, the embryo of the later CLA, and had interrogated
German prisoners-of-war: an experience which added to his stock of
sociological ideas. For why, he asked, had the German army, in spite of its
crushing defeats after 1943, preserved its morale, its cohesion? Not, he
concluded, because of the doctrines and the propaganda of the Nazi party,
nor because of the effective authority of its commanders, but rather
because of the social solidarity of the ordinary soldiers, who were held
together by traditional bonds, by loyalty to each other under the protective
leadership of their NCOs and, to a lesser extent, their junior officers. This
was the doctrine of "the primary group", to which I have already referred.
It also contained the idea - Shils' version of the idea - of the socia
of tradition.
Shils would write much about tradition. To some thinkers - to the liberal
heirs of the Enlightenment - tradition is, by definition, an irrational inheri-
tance from the dead past, a mere residue of obsolete beliefs and customs
which an enlightened society should discard as an impediment to reason
and progress. Shils dissented. For him there was no such clear dichotomy.
Tradition, he thought, is far more complex than that: it is necessary to
society, necessary to the continuity of rational as well as of irrational
thought. Scientific research and material progress themselves depend on
tradition - their own tradition- which is therefore indispensable in a
healthy society. 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. This degeneration shocked him, and at one
time he felt disgusted by intellectuals as a class. They seemed to him to
have betrayed, and to be seeking to destroy, the necessary condition of their
own continuous function. But then he discovered a redeeming force. He
found it in the continuity of a particular group of intellectuals which he
could admire: "the scientific community".
II
So he became the champion of science and of its "world-wide community".

That community, he decided, was "the closest thing to the ideal of a body
bound together by a universal devotion to a common set of standards
derived from a common tradition": a tradition acknowledged by all who
have been trained in it. In the intellectual disintegration of the postwar
years he saw the discipline of science much as the thinkers of the
Renaissance saw the discipline of humanism: as the means of creating and
sustaining a responsible, rational clerisy for a free world.
From 1962, through his periodical Minerva, published in London, Shils
preached his doctrine. Minerva, he wrote in his first number, "begins with
the assumption that pure science is the heart of scientific work, and that the
university is its proper place". "The editor of Minerva", he went on, in an
almost evangelical strain, "believes in the reality of the world-wide intellec-
tual community, and wishes Minerva to have a share in maintaining and
strengthening that community." So he sought "to draw into its circle of
contributors scholars, scientists and administrators" not only from the West
but also from the communist countries. Science was to dissolve the
confrontation of the Cold War more effectively, perhaps, than could be
done by the CIA and its intellectual instrument, the Congress for Cultural
Freedom. This last hope was not to be realised so long as the Soviet system
lasted - which was hardly surprising since, at the same time, Shils
denounced "demands that scientists or scholars be in agreement with the
policies of their governments". Such demands, he declared, were illegiti-
92 Lord Dacre
mate and had no place in Mi

in all that time, "the Soviet
But by then the prospect h
91 had taken place; the So
hope which had failed could
The proper function of int
of science, respect for traditi
run through Shils' work. Pe
Russian Jew had become som
best period, before the rot
sustained by an organic, coh
of absolutism, intellectual or
nism and McCarthyism; and
mend him in the postwar acad
that? As a professional socio
demand.
Ill
In the early postwar years, Shils combined his professorship at Chicago with
a readership at the London School of Economics. Later, in 1960, he was
lured to Cambridge, as visiting professor, by those who wished to see
sociology recognised as an academic discipline and some intellectual rigour
introduced into a subject which had suddenly become fashionable - perhaps
too fashionbable for its own good; for by now it was the favoured subject,
or perhaps the slogan, of the New Left. So Noel Annan, as coryphaeus of
that party - he has since settled down under his coronet - carried him in
triumph into King's College. Since the fellows of that college were then
discarding its traditions as fast as they could, stripping the altars with a will,
and dancing, sandal-shod, on their broken relics, Shils was not entirely
happy there; and when the pace quickened under Annan's successor, the
swinging Provost Edmund Leach, who declared that anyone over the age of
50 should be forbidden to teach, or perhaps to live, he was glad to migrate
to a rather less avant-garde institution: Peterhouse.
What could be more appropriate? Surely Peterhouse was ideally suited to
Shils. A small college, a "primary group" held together not by the distant
authority of its Master but by tribal cohesion at a lower level, a society
tenacious of tradition and yet containing within itself forward-looking
scientists of the greatest distinction. . . . Surely they were made for each
other - at least if Peterhouse was viewed from outside, from Provost
Leach's abbaye de Thélème down the road. Internal experience may not
have entirely confirmed external views: it seldom does - but certainly Shils
became devoted to Peterhouse. He showed his devotion by staying there
after his retirement and by great practical generosity. He also inspired
devotion in others. In his last illness, the former college butler, Mr Moffett,
his neighbour in Tennis Court Terrace, insisted on flying to Chicago to look
after him, as he had done so often before.
When I think of Ed Shils, how do I see him? Sometim

perpetual motion, flying here, there, everywhere, to servic
Letters: mobilising contributors, seeing to the printing
periodicals, turning up suddenly, now in Germany, at
celebrate the ultimate triumph of cultural freedom in Be
for his Tusculan disputations, held, by invitation of his
Paul II, in the papal summer palace of Castel Gandol
momentarily stabilised in his study in Tennis Court Terr
books and papers in all languages, with his green eye-s
and his bottle of green ink at hand; writing, correctin
articles, reviews for Minerva. Or perhaps he appears to m
and sometimes in my own kitchen too, even in Oxford
would regularly visit us, after my retirement from Pete
the oven or the stove, cooking those highly spiced dishes
sought out sometimes in Cambridge, sometimes in Soho
dishes I know only from hearsay: in particular that famous
aubergines cooked slowly over a hickory fire, which was
as "Ed's muck". It looked, I am told, "like a cowpat an
delicious".
When I first learned that Ed's life and his services to
thought and Peterhouse were to be commemorated in th
admit, a little surprised. He was, after all, a Jewish agno
Quaker Philadelphia, matured in Baptist Chicago, an
secular reason. Ought he not to be remembered, like oth
an impersonal, antiseptic lecture-room, in an atmosphe
severity, rather than in a high Anglican church, the ch
Crashaw, redolent of incense, permeated with memories
golden candlesticks, swirling chasubles, archaic liturgy,
holiness? However, on reflection, I modified this vi
respected tradition and regarded religion not indeed as r
as a necessary component of culture and of human life, whi
and impoverished without it. I think he would have liked
tion to be here.

Edward Shils

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Edward Shils (1910-1995)

Author(s): JEAN FLOUD and LORD DACRE

Edward Shils (1910-1995)*

I first met Edward Shils in 1946-47. We were colleagues at the Londo

' Addresses given at a service in remembrance of Edward Shils, fellow of Peterhouse

deepest and most moving confessions of faith in the value

At LSE he developed what

He decided in 1955 to visit In

As to the universities, he was,

"Government and the Universities", taking as his text Chris

The name of Edward Shils is not to be found in Who's Who or

which he played a part, and

It would be presumptuous in me to speak of his professional work as a

So he became the champion of science and of its "world-wide community".

mate and had no place in Mi

When I think of Ed Shils, how do I see him? Sometim

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