… with Daniel Bell.
Bell has died, at 91. I’ll have more to say later.
********************************
The Times obit quotes Bell on the distinction between scholar and intellectual:
The scholar has a bounded field of knowledge, a tradition, and seeks to find his place in it, adding to the accumulated, tested knowledge of the past as to a mosaic. The scholar, qua scholar, is less involved with his ‘self.’
The intellectual begins with his experience, his individual perceptions of the world, his privileges and deprivations, and judges the world by these sensibilities.
*********************************
Arguing the World is a film about Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, and Irving Kristol.
**********************************
From a 2004 interview:
[We’ve seen in the last two centuries] a triumph of the secular ideologies as against religion. [But this triumph] failed too. It failed with the end of communism, it failed with the collapse of Marxism, at least in its Russian and communist form. So that was really the end of ideology. … But I also said in 1960 that this was not the end of all ideology because you’ll always have credal warfare of new kinds, particularly with newly emerging states.
On the end of sociology as a discipline:
… I don’t think society is a system in which you have a single set of variables which control all the relationships of mankind. So if you can’t have a general theory and you can’t have sociology as a system, sociology has to go back to historical grounding. Now it can do very good empirical work and you can try to formalize it with mathematics, fair enough, if you think you can do it. In fact there’s a lot to be said for empirical sociology. But the notion that you can build out of this a general theory seems to me false, so [in that sense] that’s the end of sociology, not as an effort to look at different aspects of society, but to find a general theory.
Modernity, modernism, modernization.
I tried for my part to distinguish three things – modernity, modernism, and modernization. Modernity is an attitude to the world. You can find it in Diogenes, you can find it in the Elizabethan period. It’s an openness to the world, it’s a scepticism, rather than being fixed in certain positional modes. So modernity is not necessarily one element of time or a period but a more general element of human behaviour, or human aspiration… [M]odernism [is] a specific historical movement going back against romanticism … [and] traditionalism. Basically modernism is a certain kind of formalism. We think of the Bauhaus elements of modernism… Modernization is an effort to rationalize the administrative economic systems of the world.
January 26th, 2011 at 10:31AM
FYI, Arguing the World is available via Netflix streaming. My queue is vast, but I’ll try to get to it sooner than later.