Jack Chatfield
The Americans: The Democratic Experience By Daniel Boorstin Random House, 717 pp., $10 A deep unease characterizes modern social thought. Sociology itself, as Robert Nisbet has written in The Sociological Tradition, was founded by men surveying the ruins of the ordered world of the ancien régime, mourning the passing of the organic communities of pre-revolutionary Europe, and deploring the advent of bourgeois industrialism and the apocalyptic rationalism of Robespierre and St. Just. The greatest social philosophers of the past two hundred years—men like de Tocqueville, Durkheim, and Weber—saw the idea of progress as largely a delusion. Unlike Karl Marx (a visionary without the tragic sense; an intellectual descendant of Christian millennialists), modern sociologists set out to describe the world and not to change it. Change, they believed, was a force complex and ambiguous in its social and moral effects, and one likely to deliver us from some evils into the hands of others.
Comments