A Fragment of a Sociological Autobiography by Edward Shils

Author:Edward Shils [Shils, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351535595
Google: PiMxDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05T04:32:38+00:00

XXIX

In the winter of 1961, I wrote the essay called, “The Theory of Mass Society” which I have mentioned earlier.21 It was published in Diogenes on the invitation of Roger Caillois, a remarkably gifted self-educated sociologist whom I have always admired but whom, alas, I did not come to know well. In that essay, I asserted that one of the most prominent and characteristic features of modern society was the diminution of the distance between centers and peripheries. I was quite specific and concrete in my reference: I meant an increased deference and solicitude on the part of the incumbents of the centers towards those at the peripheries, greater attributiveness at the center to the desires and demands of the peripheries, more objects of attention in common between centers and peripheries, greater visibility of each to the other, etc.

A closely related analysis of social stratification in terms of center and periphery was a paper that I wrote for a Festschrift for Professor Darjab Prasad P. Mukherji of the University of Aligarh and one of the leading Bengali intellectuals of the twentieth century, a man of wide culture and much elegance and personal charm; although I regret to say, a “leftist” in which respect he was no different from most Bengali intellectuals educated in the twenties and thirties who did not have his talents or his sweet disposition. (This paper was entitled, “The Stratification System of Mass Society.”22) In this paper I analyzed the movement towards equality and particularly the diminished deference granted to properties like descent, ethnicity, occupation, wealth and authority in modern liberal democratic societies. I did not assert that the distribution of these properties did not affect the distribution of deference, but only that they were less weighty in affecting the distribution of deference. I suggested that the attribution of deference was more narrow or less generalized; it was not so much given to a whole person or stratum.

The stratification of deference or status (I used these terms interchangeably) was in modern liberal democracies—-disparagingly called “mass societies”—-less widely dispersed, and it was becoming less salient and less generalized and also less pervasively clarified into strata. Of course, stratification of deference or status has not disappeared and probably will never disappear but it has certainly changed some of the most gravely inegalitarian features. (The essay “Deference” first appeared in Social Stratification, edited by John Jackson of Trinity College, Dublin, and then in a somewhat revised form in a Festschrift for Harold Lasswell, Personality, Power and Politics, edited by Arnold Rogow of New York University.23)

These three papers, “The Theory of Mass Society,” The Stratification System of Mass Society” and “Deference,” overlap with each other in their essential themes. The main theme is the closer approximation of the various strata to each other as a constitutive feature of modern societies, i.e., the reduction of the distance between center and periphery. More fundamental is the increased participation of individuals from all strata in the collective self-consciousness of the national society, the center

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