One of the leading thinkers to emerge in the postwar conservative intellectual revival was the sociologist Robert Nisbet. His book The Quest for Community, published in 1953, stands as one of the most persuasive accounts of the dilemmas confronting modern society. Nearly a half century before Robert Putnam documented the atomization of society in Bowling Alone, Nisbet argued that the rise of the powerful modern state had eroded the sources of community—the family, the neighborhood, the church, the guild. Alienation and loneliness inevitably resulted. But as the traditional ties that bind fell away, the human impulse toward community led people to turn even more to the government itself, allowing statism—even totalitarianism—to flourish. ISI Books is proud to present this new edition of Nisbet’s magnum opus, featuring a brilliant introduction by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and three critical essays. Published at a time when our communal life has only grown weaker and when many Americans display cultish enthusiasm for a charismatic president, this new edition of The Quest for Community shows that Nisbet’s insights are as relevant today as ever.
This classic volume deals with a crucial contemporary social issue: the conflict between traditionalism and modernism. Nisbet considers such subjects as power, community, culture, and the university. He deals directly with the values of authority, tradition, hierarchy, and community on the one hand, and individualism, secularism, and revolt on the other. Nisbet's underlying argument is that there is a close historical relationship between the distribution of power in democratic society and the displacement of social class, kinship, neighborhood, and the church. The book challenges concerned Americans to understand and address the basic conflicts confronting contemporary society. In his introduction, Robert G. Perrin shows how the chapters in this volume reflect Nisbet's sociological vision exemplified throughout his career. Perrin notes that when these writings first appeared, they stimulated and informed debate on a broad range of topics such as value conflict, leadership, community, sociology, social class, technology, and the university. They also foreshadowed works yet to come in Nisbet's long and distinguished intellectual journey. Originally published in 1968, Tradition and Revolt was greeted with thoughtful reviews in leading sociology journals. Writing in the American Journal of Sociology, Joseph R. Gusfield called it "so welcome a publication," one containing "remarkable contributions to the analysis of modern society." Nisbet's vision of Western social life as shaped by the struggle between the dialectically opposed values of tradition and modernity illuminates contemporary issues. Tradition and Revolt will be of particular value to sociologists, cultural historians, and political theorists. Robert A. Nisbet (1913-1996) was Albert Schweitzer Professor Emeritus of the Humanities at Columbia University, and before that, dean of the School of Humanities at the University of California at Riverside. Among his many books are History of the Idea of Progress, The Sociological Tradition, The Degradation of the Academic Dogma, and Teachers and Scholars, all available from Transaction. Robert G. Perrin is professor of sociology and director of graduate studies at the University of Tennessee.
This work aims to show that sociology is indeed an art form, one that had strong kinship with literature, painting, Romantic history, and philosophy in the 19th century, the age in which sociology came into full stature.
This classic volume deals with a crucial contemporary social issue: the conflict between traditionalism and modernism. Nisbet considers such subjects as power, community, culture, and the university. He deals directly with the values of authority, tradition, hierarchy, and community on the one hand, and individualism, secularism, and revolt on the other. Nisbet's underlying argument is that there is a close historical relationship between the distribution of power in democratic society and the displacement of social class, kinship, neighborhood, and the church. The book challenges concerned Americans to understand and address the basic conflicts confronting contemporary society. In his introduction, Robert G. Perrin shows how the chapters in this volume reflect Nisbet's sociological vision exemplified throughout his career. Perrin notes that when these writings first appeared, they stimulated and informed debate on a broad range of topics such as value conflict, leadership, community, sociology, social class, technology, and the university. They also foreshadowed works yet to come in Nisbet's long and distinguished intellectual journey. Originally published in 1968, Tradition and Revolt was greeted with thoughtful reviews in leading sociology journals. Writing in the American Journal of Sociology, Joseph R. Gusfield called it "so welcome a publication," one containing "remarkable contributions to the analysis of modern society." Nisbet's vision of Western social life as shaped by the struggle between the dialectically opposed values of tradition and modernity illuminates contemporary issues. Tradition and Revolt will be of particular value to sociologists, cultural historians, and political theorists. Robert A. Nisbet (1913-1996) was Albert Schweitzer Professor Emeritus of the Humanities at Columbia University, and before that, dean of the School of Humanities at the University of California at Riverside. Among his many books are History of the Idea of Progress, The Sociological Tradition, The Degradation of the Academic Dogma, and Teachers and Scholars, all available from Transaction. Robert G. Perrin is professor of sociology and director of graduate studies at the University of Tennessee.
The University of California at Berkeley is today best known as a great research center and popularly remembered as a locus of campus unrest in the 1960s. This memoir by the eminent sociologist and historian of ideas Robert Nisbet views Berkeley from a different perspective. Teachers and Scholars is a fascinating picture of Berkeley as it was a half a century ago in its move to become the most important center of learning west of the Mississippi. Nisbet recounts his years there as student and teacher, and offers vivid portraits of Berkeley’s professors and personalities. Between the Great Depression and entry into World War II, Berkeley was a unique window on a Western world in turmoil. All the ideologies of the time—liberalism, socialism, populism, and fascism—impinged on the life of the campus. In Nisbet’s view, the thirties was the last decade of "the old Berkeley"—a school that conceived its primary mission as that of teaching. Although research was expected of every faculty member, its chief importance was widely held to be in its elevating effect on undergraduate instruction. In the shift from teaching to research, some have argued that Berkeley has lost community and consensus while others claim that the university has only enriched itself. Nisbet finds much to respect and criticize in both views. His vision permits him to compare and contrast the Berkley experience with other schools such as Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford. Rich in intellectual and social history, Teachers and Scholars is vitally pertinent to the educational questions and controversies of our own time.
One of the leading thinkers to emerge in the postwar conservative intellectual revival was the sociologist Robert Nisbet. His book The Quest for Community, published in 1953, stands as one of the most persuasive accounts of the dilemmas confronting modern society. Nearly a half century before Robert Putnam documented the atomization of society in Bowling Alone, Nisbet argued that the rise of the powerful modern state had eroded the sources of community—the family, the neighborhood, the church, the guild. Alienation and loneliness inevitably resulted. But as the traditional ties that bind fell away, the human impulse toward community led people to turn even more to the government itself, allowing statism—even totalitarianism—to flourish. This edition of Nisbet’s magnum opus features a brilliant introduction by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and three critical essays. Published at a time when our communal life has only grown weaker and when many Americans display cultish enthusiasm for a charismatic president, this new edition of The Quest for Community shows that Nisbet’s insights are as relevant today as ever.
Practical Data Analytics for Innovation in Medicine: Building Real Predictive and Prescriptive Models in Personalized Healthcare and Medical Research Using AI, ML, and Related Technologies, Second Edition discusses the needs of healthcare and medicine in the 21st century, explaining how data analytics play an important and revolutionary role. With healthcare effectiveness and economics facing growing challenges, there is a rapidly emerging movement to fortify medical treatment and administration by tapping the predictive power of big data, such as predictive analytics, which can bolster patient care, reduce costs, and deliver greater efficiencies across a wide range of operational functions. Sections bring a historical perspective, highlight the importance of using predictive analytics to help solve health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, provide access to practical step-by-step tutorials and case studies online, and use exercises based on real-world examples of successful predictive and prescriptive tools and systems. The final part of the book focuses on specific technical operations related to quality, cost-effective medical and nursing care delivery and administration brought by practical predictive analytics. Brings a historical perspective in medical care to discuss both the current status of health care delivery worldwide and the importance of using modern predictive analytics to help solve the health care crisis Provides online tutorials on several predictive analytics systems to help readers apply their knowledge on today’s medical issues and basic research Teaches how to develop effective predictive analytic research and to create decisioning/prescriptive analytic systems to make medical decisions quicker and more accurate
The essential concerns of conservatism are the same as those that motivated Nisbet's first and most influential book. The Quest for Community. In fact, Conservatism unites virtually all of Nisbet's work. In it, Nisbet deals with the political causes of the manifold forms of alienation that underwrite the human quest for community. The sovereign political state is more than a legal relationship of a superstructure of power, it is inseparable from its successive penetrations of man's economic, religious, kinship and local allegiances, and its revolutionary dislocations of established centers of power. Nisbet holds that although political philosophers are often conceived in terms of their views of the individual and the state, a more useful approach adds the factor of social groups or communities mediating between the individual and the state. Such groups comprise "society" the protection of which is the "sole object" of the conservative tradition, according to Nisbet. This conservative ideology arose in the West as a reaction to the French Revolution and its perceived impact upon traditional society. Edmund Burke was the first spokesman of the new ideology. In this book, Nisbet argues that modern conservatism throughout the West can be seen as a widening of Burke's indictment not only of the French Revolution, but of the larger revolution we have come to call modernity. From Edmund Burke and his contemporaries such as Bonald, de Maistre, Haller, and Savigny, down to T.S. Eliot, Christopher Dawson, Michael Oakeshott, Irving Babbit, Paul Elmer More, and Russell Kirk, the essential themes of political conservatism remained the same. They are centered upon history, tradition, property, authority, liberty and religion, and attack equally the political collectivism and radical individualism that have the same irrational outcomes. Nisbet makes the point that, at present, conservatism is also in a crisis, one created in large measure by mixing in the political arena economic liberalism and welfare state socialism - a lethal mix for conservative politics.
This classic volume deals with a crucial contemporary social issue: the conflict between traditionalism and modernism. Nisbet considers such subjects as power, community, culture, and the university. He deals directly with the values of authority, tradition, hierarchy, and community on the one hand, and individualism, secularism, and revolt on the other. Nisbet's underlying argument is that there is a close historical relationship between the distribution of power in democratic society and the displacement of social class, kinship, neighborhood, and the church. The book challenges concerned Americans to understand and address the basic conflicts confronting contemporary society. In his introduction, Robert G. Perrin shows how the chapters in this volume reflect Nisbet's sociological vision exemplified throughout his career. Perrin notes that when these writings first appeared, they stimulated and informed debate on a broad range of topics such as value conflict, leadership, community, sociology, social class, technology, and the university. They also foreshadowed works yet to come in Nisbet's long and distinguished intellectual journey. Originally published in 1968, Tradition and Revolt was greeted with thoughtful reviews in leading sociology journals. Writing in the American Journal of Sociology, Joseph R. Gusfield called it "so welcome a publication," one containing "remarkable contributions to the analysis of modern society." Nisbet's vision of Western social life as shaped by the struggle between the dialectically opposed values of tradition and modernity illuminates contemporary issues. Tradition and Revolt will be of particular value to sociologists, cultural historians, and political theorists. Robert A. Nisbet (1913-1996) was Albert Schweitzer Professor Emeritus of the Humanities at Columbia University, and before that, dean of the School of Humanities at the University of California at Riverside. Among his many books are History of the Idea of Progress, The Sociological Tradition, The Degradation of the Academic Dogma, and Teachers and Scholars, all available from Transaction. Robert G. Perrin is professor of sociology and director of graduate studies at the University of Tennessee.
A great moralist and social thinker illuminates the most vexing issues of our time--war, old age, racism, abortion, boredom, crime and punishment, sociobiology--in a book which is by turns hilarious and somber but always vigorous and stimulating.
Why do people commit crimes? How do we control crime? The theories that criminologists use to answer these questions are built on a number of underlying assumptions, including those about the nature of crime, free will, human nature, and society. These assumptions have a fundamental impact on criminology: they largely determine what criminologists study, the causes they examine, the control strategies they recommend, and how they test their theories and evaluate crime-control strategies. In Toward a Unified Criminology, noted criminologist Robert Agnew provides a critical examination of these assumptions, drawing on a range of research and perspectives to argue that these assumptions are too restrictive, unduly limiting the types of "crime" that are explored, the causes that are considered, and the methods of data collection and analysis that are employed. As such, they undermine our ability to explain and control crime. Agnew then proposes an alternative set of assumptions, drawing heavily on both mainstream and critical theories of criminology, with the goal of laying the foundation for a unified criminology that is better able to explain a broader range of crimes.
BIOG Johannsen's 1983 biography won the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians. Though most know Douglas for his famous debates with Abraham Lincoln, Johannsen reveals him to be one of the most powerful and formidable politicians of his time. This edition contains a new introduction.-
Anyone connected withCalifornia-as alumnus, student, or faculty member-will revel in a new book calledTeachers and Scholars...[Nisbet's memoir is a charmingreminder of such loyalty, not only to a university but also to the ideas of a freesociety." -William K.Muir, California Monthly
The primary purpose of Metaphor and History is to explain the sources and contexts of the Western idea of social development. Nisbet explores the concept of social change across the whole range of Western culture, from ancient Greece to the present day. He does not see the idea of social development as a nineteenth-century phenomenon or a by-product of the idea of biological evolution.
Discusses the schism between the religious right and mainstream Protestantism, the separation of church and state, and the relationship between science and religion.
This is one of the most important books ever published about the American university. Robert Nisbet accuses universities of having betrayed themselves. Over the centuries they earned the respect of society by attempting to remain faithful to what he terms "the academic dogma," the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The measure of a university's greatness and of the stature of an individual scholar was determined not by the immediate usefulness of the work done, but by how much it contributed to scholarship, learning, and teaching. American universities abandoned this ideal, Nisbet charges, after World War II, welcoming onto their campuses academic entrepreneurs engaged in the "higher capitalism," the highly profitable sale of knowledge. This "reformation," says Nisbet, has resulted in the greatest change in the structure and values of the university that has occurred since their founding as guilds in the Middle Ages. And it may be responsible, for reasons he spells out in convincing detail, for their eventual demise as centers of learning. In her introduction, Gertrude Himmelfarb pays tribute to Robert Nisbet for his prescience in analyzing the reformation of the university in the postwar period. A second reformation, she says, has further undermined the academic dogma, first by applying the principles of affirmative action and multiculturalism to the curriculum as well as to student admissions and faculty hiring, and then by "deconstructing" the disciplines, thus subverting the ideas of truth, reason, and objectivity. The Degradation of the Academic Dogma is even more pertinent today than when it was first published a quarter of a century ago. For those concerned with the integrity of the university and of intellectual life, Robert Nisbet has once again proved himself a prophet and a mentor.
Examines the history of evolutionism in cultural anthropology, beginning with its roots in the 19th century, through the half-century of anti-evolutionism, to its reemergence in the 1950s, and the current perspectives on it today. No other book covers the subject so fully or over such a long period of time.. Evolutionism and Cultural Anthropology traces the interaction of evolutionary thought and anthropological theory from Herbert Spencer to the twenty-first century. It is a focused examination of how the idea of evolution has continued to provide anthropology with a master principle around which a vast body of data can be organized and synthesized. Erudite and readable, and quoting extensively from early theorists (such as Edward Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, John McLennan, Henry Maine, and James Frazer) so that the reader might judge them on the basis of their own words, Evolutionism and Cultural Anthropology is useful reading for courses in anthropological theory and the history of anthropology. 0813337666 Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology : a Critical History
From the time of John Milton to that of William Blake, the literature of Britain absorbed the impact of two major military developments. In the early modern era, the military revolution strove to establish permanent armies under state discipline and, in England, the resistance to this development exhibited in the controversy over standing armies. In this penetrating and highly original study, Gordon demonstrates that military debate, encouraged by Britain's semi-secure insular situation, had a remarkable impact on the British imagination and its narratives. Affected were structure and closure; character evaluation; heroic and mock-heroic styles; attitudes toward love and marriage; and the roles of locality and environment in the shaping of the national and personal character. More remarkable still, these effects signaled the emergence of a civilian consciousness that still influences our literary preference and expectations.
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