Edward Shils

Types of Power and Status

The article discusses the major types of power and status and certain variable characteristics relevant for their investigation. A person is said to have power if he influences the bahavior of others in accordance with his own intentions. Three major forms of power are distinguished in terms of the type influence brought to bear on the subordinated individual. Power is further distinguished by wheter or not the subordinated individual recognize its legitimacy, by types of motivation of obedience and disobedience, and by the consequences of disobedience. Certain characteristics of the power relation are then discussed, and some factors influencing the amount of power are analyzed. A judgment of rank made about either the total person or relatively stable segments of the person constitutes the social status of that person (for the individual making the judgment). Gestures expressing the status of an individual are called deference. Certain types of status are differentiated, and parallel distinctions are made for deference.

Toward a General Theory of Action.

Downloading the book in this website lists can give you more advantages. It will show you the best book collections and completed collections. So many books can be found in this website. So, this is not only this toward a general theory of action. However, this book is referred to read because it is an inspiring book to give you more chance to get experiences and also thoughts. This is simple, read the soft file of the book and you get it.

Ideology and Utopia.

Foreword, Preface, Preface to the new Edition, Books and Monographs by Karl Mannheim, 1. Preliminary Approach to the Problem, 2. Ideology and Utopia, 3. The Prospects of Scientific Politics

The Intellectuals in the Political Development of the New States

The gestation, birth, and continuing life of the new states of Asia and Africa, through all their vicissitudes, are in large measure the work of intellectuals. In no state-formations in all of human history have intellectuals played such a role as they have in these events of the present century.In the past, new states were founded by military conquest, by the secession of ethnic groups led by traditional tribal and warrior chiefs, by the gradual extension of the power of the prince through intermarriage, agreement, and conquest, or by separation through military rebellion. In antiquity, the demand that subjects acknowledge the divinity of the Emperor was no more than a requirement that the legitimacy of the existing order be recognized.

The Intellectuals and the Powers: Some Perspectives for Comparative Analysis

In religion, in art, in all spheres of culture and politics, the mass of mankind in all hitherto known societies have not, except for transitory interludes, been preoccupied with the attainment of an immediate contact with the ultimate principles implicit in their beliefs and standards. The directly gratifying ends of particular actions, the exigencies of situations, considerations of individual and familial advantage, concrete moral maxims, concrete prescriptions and prohibitions, preponderate in the conduct of the majority of persons in most societies, large and small. The systemic coherence and the deeper and more general ground of beliefs and standards only intermittently hold their attention and touch on their passions. Ordinary life in every society is characterized by an unequal intensity of attachment to ultimate values, be they cognitive, moral, or aesthetic, and an unequal intensity of the need for coherence. Ordinary life shuns rigorous definition and consistent adherence to traditional or rational rules, and it has no need for continuous contact with the sacred. Ordinary life is slovenly, full of compromise and improvisation; it goes on in the “here and now”.

The Concentration and Dispersion of Charisma: Their Bearing on Economic Policy in Underdeveloped Countries

The countries with underdeveloped economies are primarily peasant countries and their national unity is quite new and fragmentary. The uneducated classes are rooted mainly in local territorial and kinship groups; sometimes they are the dependents of feudal magnates to whom are directed whatever wider loyalties they have. They do not have the strong sense of nationality which drives the leaders of their country, who are often the creators of the new nation and not merely of the new state. These leaders are strong and creative persons who have broken away from the bonds of the old order—the bonds of kin and family and local territory.

Do We Still Need Academic Freedom

with academic obligation. The activities of the committee on academic freedom and tenure made up most of the agenda of activities of the Association; the committee on academic obligations had never once met, according to Deweys recollection. The American Association of University Professors was a product of the situation in which some of the leading university teachers in the country thought that, because the academic profession was entitled to respect as a calling, they were entitled to academic freedom. Even in the second decade of the twentieth century, powerful persons outside the universities, and within the universities trustees, presidents, and deans, or heads of departments still regarded their academic staffs as hired hands to be appointed and dismissed at will. Such persons were regarded as the enemies of academic freedom. Although there are still some rough-handed presidents and deans in back-country colleges and state universities, on the whole these traditional enemies of academic freedom are seldom any longer to be seen. In the minds of the American academics who were active in the early years of the Association, academic freedom and permanence of tenure were indissolubly associated with each other. At that time, it was said that the latter was needed to guarantee the former. Academic freedom was declared to be an assurance that new ideas would be discovered, that sound old ideas would be appreciated in a more critical way, and that unsound ones would be discarded. The argument for academic freedom was roughly the argument for liberty in general put forth by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. It was also

The Academic Ethos under Strain.

The decade before the outbreak of the Second World War had been a very hard time for universities. The worldwide economic depression affected universities as it affected all other institutions. In Great Britain, which was perhaps least injured, the chances of employment of university graduates did not decline markedly, but the universities did not recruit many young members to their teaching staffs. The already established university teachers were not loosened from their moorings. A small number became communists or supporters of communism, but this did not interfere with their performance of the tasks of teaching and research to which they had committed themselves.1 They did not attempt to impel their universities towards their own political objectives. Under the dominion of an ungenerous ministerial bureaucracy, French universities carried on in a humdrum way. Their graduates were finding it difficult to obtain employment, their teachers were becoming somewhat more radical politically. Nonetheless, French academics retained their traditional views that teaching was a chore, that the supervision of dissertations was a little better, and that to do scientific or scholarly research was best of all.

The order of learning in the United States from 1865 to 1920: The ascendancy of the universities

The history of the order of learning in the United States between the end of the Civil War and the end of the First World War may be seen largely as the history of a fundamental change in the institutional structure of learning; one particular class of institutions became dominant over other classes of learned institutions and particular institutions within that newly dominant class became especially dominant. The universities as seats of learning gained ascendancy over other institutional forms for the discovery and diffusion of knowledge. The ascendancy consisted in superiority in productivity qualitative and quantitative and in prestige. The prestige was equally prestige of institutions, prestige of works, prestige of individuals. The prestige was accorded both within the order of learning and by the wider public. The ascendancy of the academic order within the order of learning was accompanied by and in a certain measure furthered by the ascendancy of a small number of universities as the centre of the academic order.

Tradition and Liberty: Antinomy and Interdependence

O NE of the most deeply established traditions of liberal thought in East and West asserts that tradition is antagonistic toward liberty. Protestantism denied the validity of accumulated tradition in favor of the primacy of the revelation contained in Scripture. The process of emancipation of the mind from external determination went on, when revelation as well was rejected, to the point where the genuine source of valid knowledge and experience was found to reside in the powers of the individual spirit. Rationalistic liberalism, which ascribed validity only to what the individual himself had decided in the light of his own perceptions and reason, criticized tradition as the mindless repetition of inherited lines of thought and conduct into which individuality did not enter. Romantic liberalism was hostile to tradition because tradition cramped the spontaneity which constituted the essential nature of the individual. Tradition imposed barriers on mans conduct and restraints * Originally presented at the Conference on the Future of Freedom, held under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, at Milan, in September, 1955. on his thought and sentiment; it prevented him from seeing with his own eyes and from feeling and valuing according to his own creative powers. The inherent antinomy between tradition and liberty to which liberal belief correctly points has been underlined for the liberals by the fact that the antagonists of the movement of liberty -the defenders of oligarchical forms of government, the opponents of intellectual freedom and moral egalitarianism -have almost always claimed tradition for themselves. They have argued not only for the substantive traditions of particular institutional practices and beliefs but also for tradition as such as the right means of guiding conduct. The truths which conservatives put forward about the nature of tradition and its ineluctibility have been so intertwined with their support of arrangements which have become intolerable to the awakened sensibilities of the modern conscience that assertions about the value of tradition have come to be suspected as implicit arguments for the substance transmitted by tradition. A deforming, simplifying rigidity has been imposed on thought, and the proponents of liberty have become its vic-