Review

Author(s): Arthur K. Davis

Review by: Arthur K. Davis
Source: American Sociological Review, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Aug., 1953), pp. 443-444
Published by: American Sociological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2087566
Accessed: 29-12-2015 17:11 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Sage Publications, Inc. and American Sociological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to American Sociological Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 132.77.150.148 on Tue, 29 Dec 2015 17:11:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BOOK REVIEWS
havior make most sense when seen through
culture . . . "
The book concludes with two useful essays by
Alfred G. Meyer on the concept of the culture
in Germany and Russia.
JOSEPH BRAM
New York University
The Quest for Community: A Study in the
Ethics of Freedom and Order. By ROBERT A.
NISBET. New York: Oxford University Press,
1953. ix, 303 pp. $5.00.
The argument of this book is stated in Part I.
Modern society is characterized by social dis-
organization and personal insecurity, if we may
judge by selected scientific studies (Durkheim,
Mayo, Horney) and by the literature of aliena-
tion (Toynbee, Eliot, Berdyaev, et al). The
essential cause of our insecurity is the disloca-
tion of kinship, church, and other local groups
by the centralizing State. In the face of this
anomie the key 19th-century ideas of individual-
ism, secularism and progress are on the defen-
sive. The quest for community is the author's
concern for the intimate social solidarity and
moral certainty associated with small groups.
Part II reviews the post-medieval era. Nisbet
interprets the basic trend in social organization
as the decline of community and the rise of the
omnipotent State. "The single most decisive in-
fluence upon Western social organization has
been the development of the centralized terri-
torial State" (p. 98). The history of the relevant
political ideas associated with this process is then
summarized.The culmination of the modern era
is totalitarianism, defined as a mass of isolated
persons who find their community mainly in the
central State, once the intermediate local and
kinship groups have been undermined. To Nisbet
this signifies the "annihilation of individuality"
(p. 201).
Part III asserts that freedom inheres in au-
tonomous local groups. "Freedom thrives in cul-
tural diversity, in local and regional differentia-
tion, in associative pluralism, and, above all, in
the diversification of power" (p. 265). Solution
of the contemporary problem of order requires
a renewal of small-group contexts for many
social relationships. How this can be accom-
plished the author fails to say. He recognizes,
however, that we cannot turn back the clock.
This book is essentially a conservative ideo-
logical essay. It stresses the social values of
localism and familism; it carefully elucidates
the "good" (i.e., community-making) aspects of
war. Yet it unwittingly documents some leading
arguments of the Left. That anxiety and dis-
organization and a literature of decay are 20th-
This content downloaded from 132.77.150.148 on Tue, 29 Dec 2015 17:11:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
443
century characteristics is true. But they are
specific features of "old regime" societies, like
the Western nations today, preoccupied with war
and the imminent dissolution of their world.
Nisbet's conception of the modern mass revolu-
tions abroad is unfortunately patterned after
Orwell's 1984. A more Olympian view would
reveal that there is confidence and reconstruc-
tion in the present era as well as pessimism and
destructiveness.
The analysis of family roles and small-group
values is brilliant. In its broader aspects the
reasoning may seem overdrawn to some readers.
Nineteenth century "individualism" has some-
thing of the straw man about it, and so too has
the so-called twentieth century "atomizing" of
the masses. The theory of the primacy of the
State in modern social change is surely one-
sided. Is it not more useful to conceive of change
in terms of a system of elements wherein no
single factor leads or lags except for purposes
of analysis? Nisbet come perilously close to a
one-factor theory of change.
His identification of freedom with cultural di-
versity and decentralized groups is philosophi-
cally legitimate but sociologically parochial. A
sociological definition of freedom valid for any
social system would run more like this: freedom
is a subjective feeling of personal well-being
which results from the objective fact of living
in an effectively functioning society. A society
functions effectively to the degree that its social
structure is integrated, that it successfully meets
its problems of internal and external change, that
it socializes new members, satisfies or reconciles
their needs and expectations, etc. The point is
that a number of concrete patterns of societal
organization can meet this abstract definition of
freedom. It is entirely possible that among them
is Nisbet's bogey, the totalitarian community-
once the latter has been stabilized or routinized.
In transition eras, societies fulfill their func-
tional requirements less effectively; hence their
members feel they have less freedom.
Nisbet sees clearly the malintegration between
primary groups and large-scale organization, and
the resulting primary-group anomie. He fails to
consider those sources of personal insecurity
which originate in large-scale organization, e.g.,
the overemphasis on competitive upward mo-
bility, the business cycle and overproduction,
institutional pressures toward war and imperial-
ism, the persistence of discrimination against
minorities, management-labor conflict. Solution
of these problems will require more State action,
probably nothing less than comprehensive cen-
tral planning, which in turn may provide a frame-
work for approaching the small-group problems
raised by Nisbet.
The Quest for Community gives us an in-
444 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICALREVIEW
cisive analysis of certain lesser aspects of the deals intensively with the problem of relativism
present crisis, but no cure. and absolutism in knowledge. In the second,
Since sociological writing is often criticized "Historicism," his solution for this ancient di-
for incomprehensibility, it is a pleasure to note lemma of thought is that Reason or Truth must
how exceptionally well written this book is. be seen as a dynamic, evolving totality rather
than as a static, supra-temporal absolute. The
ARTHUR K. DAVIS third essay, "The Problem of a Sociology of
Columbia University Knowledge," is Mannheim's first statement of
the more essentially sociological theory which
Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. By KARL he later enlarged and developed in great detail
MANNHEIM (Edited by PAUL KECSKEMETI). in his book, Ideology and Utopia.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1952. The theme of the fourth essay, "Competition
viii, 327 pp. $6.00. as a Cultural Phenomenon," is, in Mannheim's
own words (p. 198): "Different interpretations
This volume contains six monographic essays
of the world for the most part correspond to the
written by Karl Mannheim from 1923 to 1930,
particular positions the various groups occupy
when he was a brilliant and already mature
in their struggle for power." In this struggle, the
young scholar in pre-Nazi Germany. The essays
process of polarization creates a dialectic of ideas
have now been lucidly translated and carefully
from which emerge new intellectual syntheses.
edited by Paul Kecskemeti, who has also written
The fifth essay, "On the Nature of Economic
an excellent introduction. In this introduction
Ambition and Its Significance for the Social
there is a description of the social and intel-
Education of Man," is a pioneer exploration of
lectual backgrounds of Mannheim's ideas. The
the "culture and personality" field as it has
social background was the moral disillusionment
come to be called since Mannheim's time. Here
and utopianism of post-World War I Germany.
Mannheim discusses very concretely as well as
The four main components of the immediate in-
analytically how social structure defines "suc-
tellectual background were Marxism, the phe-
cess" differently for various groups and how
nomenology of Husserl and Scheler, the anti- social
position molds individual personality and
positivism of Dilthey and Max Weber, and the motives, directs ambition,
and determines indi-
structural approach of "historicism" in the cul- vidual life-plans and
life-chances. Max Weber's
tural sciences and of Gestaltism in psychology. influence is especially notable in this essay.
The introduction also presents a detailed tracing The last essay, "The Problem of Genera-
out of the evolution of Mannheim's ideas in tions," analyzes the creation
by social structure
interaction with these social and intellectual and social change of socially and
historically dif-
forces, and a brief but useful critique. Kecske- ferentiated age-groups and their
associated in-
meti's somewhat philosophical approach, in this tellectual and moral
conceptions. Recent social
critique, to the crucial problem of relativism science has treated only one small aspect
of this
and absolutism in knowledge can be profitably "problem of generations" in various studies of
supplemented by the more sociological analysis the sociology of adolescence.
of Talcott Parsons (The Social System, Ch. This is but a synopsis of the main points of
VIII, Belief Systems and the Social System: exceedingly rich material. "Our view of
life," as
The Problem of the "Role of Ideas") and Robert Mannheim says (p. 84), "has already
become
K. Merton (Social Theory and Social Structure, thoroughly sociological," and he has been a
crea-
Ch. IX, Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of tive leader in the transformation of our
thought.
Knowledge). Every page of this work still rewards close
In the first essay, "On the Interpretation of study. These essays are all the more pleasurable
'Weltanschauung',"Mannheim answers the ques- to read because they draw on history, philosophy,
tion: How do we know and explain cultural phe- literature, art, indeed, all of culture for insight
nomena? In reaction against intellectual posi- and example. We learn, therefore, about many
tivism and atomism, Mannheim declares the in- particular substantive matters as well as about
dependence of "the logic of the cultural sciences the general sociological problems that are always
which we shall have one day" (p. 35) and the Mannheim's primary concern. There is here, for
need for a structural or organic concept of sys- example, wonderful intellectual history, espe-
tem in that logic. Mannheim's question in this cially about Germany in the nineteenth and
essay has recently been very systematically and twentieth centuries.
extensively treated by F. Znaniecki in his monu- WXecan look forward to one more volume of
mental Cultural Sciences, Their Origin and De- Mannheim's work. The next collection will in-
velopment which likewise stresses the concepts clude two essays from the period covered by
of "meaningfulness"and "system." the present volume and several others from the
In the second and third essays, Mannheim period beginning with his emigration from Nazi

This content downloaded from 132.77.150.148 on Tue, 29 Dec 2015 17:11:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions