Sociology as an Art Form

By Robert A. Nisbet

1976

First Published

3.33

Average Rating

159

Number of Pages

4H49M

Audio Length

"One of our most original social thinkers," according to the New York Times, Robert Nisbet offers a new approach to sociology. He shows that sociology is indeed an art form, one that has a strong kinship with literature, painting, Romantic history, and philosophy in the nineteenth century, the age in which sociology came into full stature. Sociology as an Art Form is an introduction for the initiated and the uninitiated in so-ciology. Nisbet explains the degree to which sociology draws from the same creative impulses, themes and styles (rooted in history), and actual modes of representa-tion found in the arts. He shows how the founding sociologists such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel constructed portraits (of the bourgeois, the worker, and the intellectual) and landscapes (of the masses, the poor, the factory system), all reflecting and contribut-ing to identical portraits and landscapes found in the literature and art of the period. In addition to marking the similarities between sociologists' and artists' efforts to depict motion or movement, Nisbet emphasizes the relation of sociology to the fin de siecle in art and literature, with examples such as alienation, anomie, and degeneration. He creates an elegant, brilliantly reasoned appraisal of sociology's contribution to modern culture. This book will be of interest to sociologists, artists, and anyone interested in how the fields relate to one another.

Avg Rating

3.33

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

11%

4 STARS

33%

3 STARS

33%

2 STARS

22%

1 STARS

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Author

Robert A. Nisbet

Author · 13 books

American sociologist, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Vice-Chancellor at the University of California, Riverside and as the Albert Schweitzer Professor at Columbia University. After serving in the US Army during World War II, when he was stationed on Saipan in the Pacific theatre, Nisbet founded the Department of Sociology at Berkeley, and was briefly Chairman. Nisbet left an embroiled Berkeley in 1953 to become a dean at the University of California, Riverside, and later a Vice-Chancellor. Nisbet remained in the University of California system until 1972, when he left for the University of Arizona at Tucson. Soon thereafter, he was appointed to the prestigious Albert Schweitzer Chair at Columbia. On retiring from Columbia in 1978, Nisbet continued his scholarly work for eight years at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. In 1988, President Reagan asked him to deliver the Jefferson Lecture in Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Nisbet's first important work, The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) contended that modern social science's individualism denied an important human drive toward community as it left people without the aid of their fellows in combating the centralizing power of the national state. Nisbet is seen as follower of Emile Durkheim in the understanding of modern sociocultural systems and their drift. Often identified with the political right, Nisbet began his career as a political liberal but later confessed a conversion to a kind of philosophical Conservatism