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Edward Shils (1910–1995)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Julius Gould
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Extract

EDWARD SHILS WAS A PROLIFIC, FORMIDABLE AND unconventional sociologist. Sustained by his immense learning and extraordinary memory, and following the traditions of Max Weber and of the Chicago School, he brought other disciplines (notably European social and political thought) to bear upon his sociology. Over his long and productive lifetime he held positions in the most distinguished of universities: in England these included the LSE, Manchester and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He regularly spent about half of every year in Cambridge. Above all he was a loyal and long-serving teacher at the University of Chicago where he was distinguished service professor and had been among those who established the Committee of Social Thought. His scholarship was recognized in the USA by the invitation of the US National Council on the Humanities to give the prestigious Jefferson Lecture in 1979 and in Europe by the award of the Balzan Prize for service to general sociology in 1983. Government and Opposition has itself lost a most valued contributor and member of its Advisory Board.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1995 , pp. 240 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1995

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References

1 Annan, N., Our Age, London, Fontana, 2nd edition, 1991, pp. 146–7.Google Scholar

2 SeeBulmer, M., The Chicago School of Sociology, Chicago and London, Chicago University Press, 1986.Google Scholar At p. xix he prefaces his reference to Shils’s ‘encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of the social sciences’ with the words: ‘Even if Thomas Kuhn errs slightly in saying that Professor Shils has read everything …’

3 Shils, E., The Torment of Secrecy, London, Heinemann, 1956, p. 238.Google Scholar

4 ibid., p. 159.

5 Shils, E., Tradition, 1981, Chicago, Chicago University Press, p. 304.Google Scholar

6 ibid., p. 278.

7 ibid., p. 304.

8 ‘Reflections on Religious Pluralism in Civil Societies’ in Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde and Edward Shils (eds),Jews and Christians in a Pluralistic World, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991, pp. 163–4.

9 Shils’s ‘Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties’ was republished in his book Center and Periphery, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1975. My references to Cooley are drawn from p. 112 and pp. 123–4 of that volume.

10 Government and Opposition, Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter 1991, p. 9.

11 ibid., p. 11.

12 Gould, J., ‘Edward Shils’s Achievement’, Encounter, May 1981, p. 70.Google Scholar