The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah

Description

The first major collection of writings on the life and work of Robert N. Bellah

‘The Anthem Companion to Robert Bellah’ is the first major collection of writings on the life and work of one of the foremost twentieth-century sociologists of religion. Bellah’s work was central in many fields: the sociology of Japanese religion, the relationships between sociology and the humanities, the relationship between American religion and politics, the cultures of modern individualism, and evolution and society. During an intellectual career which spanned six decades, Bellah occupied a central position within at least three major intellectual movements: structural-functionalism and modernization theory in the 1950s and the 1960s; interpretive social science, which he helped create in the early 1970s along with Clifford Geertz and Peter Berger; and the so-called Axial age revival of the late 1990s and early 2000s. More often than not, Bellah’s work was on the edge of social scientific research; his seminal work on civil religion in the early 1970s created a huge debate across disciplines which continues to this day; his co-authored book ‘Habits of the Heart’ (1985) was a bestseller and the object of sustained debate in the general public sphere; his last magnum opus ‘Religion in Human Evolution’, published at 84, was a monument to an extraordinary scholarly and intellectual career. [NP] The richness of Bellah’s work is the object of this collection of essays by top American and European scholars from the social sciences and humanities. Each essay has a double character: it introduces a single topic in an accessible and complete manner, and then presents a reflection on the viability and import of Bellah’s ideas for interpreting contemporary phenomena. Among the authors are some of Bellah’s students who became top scholars in their fields, as well as younger scholars. From a disciplinary point of view, the list includes sociologists (Gorski, Torpey, Boy, Guhin, Libeck), historians (Borovoy, Barshay) and philosophers (Tipton, Lequire) to reflect the diversity of Bellah’s work.

Notes on Contributors; Introduction: On Being a Scholar and an Intellectual, Matteo Bortolini; Part 1 MAJOR THEMES; Chapter 1 Dialogues between Area Studies and Social Thought: Robert Bellah’s Engagement with Japan, Amy Borovoy; Chapter 2 Civil Religion and Public Theology, Steven M. Tipton; Chapter 3 Out of the Deep Past: The Axial Age and Robert Bellah’s Project of Social Criticism, John D. Boy and John Torpey; Part 2 YESTERDAY AND TODAY; Chapter 4 Broken Covenant Redux? Civil Religion in Crisis, Philip Gorski; Chapter 5 Robert Bellah’s Catholic Imagination, Jeffrey Guhin; Chapter 6 Habits of the Heart Revisited: American Individualism before and after the Communitarian Moment, Eric R. Lybeck; Part 3 UNEXPECTED MASTERS; Chapter 7 Friends in History: Eric Voegelin and Robert Bellah, Peter Brickey LeQuire; Chapter 8 The Protestant Imagination: Robert Bellah, Maruyama Masao and the Study of Japanese Thought, Andrew E. Barshay; Index.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sociology
• Social theory
• Social sciences

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 28 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783089642
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah
ANTHEM COMPANIONS TO SOCIOLOGY
Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.
Series Editor: Bryan S. Turner (City University of New York, USA/Australian Catholic University, Australia/University of Potsdam, Germany)
Titles in the Series
The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville
The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte
The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills
The Anthem Companion to Émile Durkheim
The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch
The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes
The Anthem Companion to Ferdinand Tönnies
The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde
The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel
The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt
The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim
The Anthem Companion to Karl Marx
The Anthem Companion to Max Weber
The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff
The Anthem Companion to Pierre Bourdieu
The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah
The Anthem Companion to Robert Park
The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons
The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen
The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah
Edited by
Matteo Bortolini
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2019
by ANTHEM PRESS
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and
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© 2019 Matteo Bortolini editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-962-8 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-962-8 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: On Being a Scholar and an Intellectual
Matteo Bortolini
Part 1 MAJOR THEMES
Chapter 1 Dialogues between Area Studies and Social Thought: Robert Bellah’s Engagement with Japan
Amy Borovoy
Chapter 2 Civil Religion and Public Theology
Steven M. Tipton
Chapter 3 Out of the Deep Past: The Axial Age and Robert Bellah’s Project of Social Criticism
John D. Boy and John Torpey
Part 2 YESTERDAY AND TODAY
Chapter 4 Broken Covenant Redux? Civil Religion in Crisis
Philip Gorski
Chapter 5 Robert Bellah’s Catholic Imagination
Jeffrey Guhin
Chapter 6 Habits of the Heart Revisited : American Individualism before and after the Communitarian Moment
Eric R. Lybeck
Part 3 UNEXPECTED MASTERS
Chapter 7 Friends in History: Eric Voegelin and Robert Bellah
Peter Brickey LeQuire
Chapter 8 The Protestant Imagination: Robert Bellah, Maruyama Masao and the Study of Japanese Thought
Andrew E. Barshay
Index
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Andrew E. Barshay teaches modern Japanese history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of three books: State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (1988); The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions (2004); and most recently, The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956 (2013).
Amy Borovoy is Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University; her field is cultural anthropology. Her work focuses on social democracy in modern Japan. She is the author of The Too-Good Wife: Alcohol, Codependence, and the Politics of Nurturance in Postwar Japan (2005). Her current manuscript, Japan in American Social Thought, explores Japan studies as terrain for reflection on the good society in the postwar American social sciences, and the struggle to challenge Euro-centrism in the context of American hegemony.
Matteo Bortolini is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Padova, Italy. His research focuses on intellectuals and ideas, religion and the comparative historical sociology of the social sciences. He is writing a biography of Robert N. Bellah.
John D. Boy is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Leiden University. Previously he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam and a visiting research fellow at Utrecht University’s Center for the Humanities. He received his Ph.D. in sociology with a certificate in women’s studies from the City University of New York. A sociologist with broad interests in religion, urban space and digital networks, his recent work seeks to understand how social media impinge on urban life and hierarchies of social status.
Philip Gorski is Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University. He writes on religion and politics in comparative and historical perspective. His most recent book is American Covenant (2017).
Jeffrey Guhin is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCLA, and his research interests include education, culture, religion and theory. His first book, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, is tentatively titled Let There Be No Compulsion: Muslim and Christian Schools in America, and it is a comparison of two Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian high schools. His next book, for which he has completed fieldwork, is an ethnographic comparison of morality and citizenship in three urban public school districts. Finally, he has another project in formation that will compare moral correction in Muslim, Catholic and secular 4th grade classrooms in seven global cities.
Peter Brickey LeQuire is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Samford University and Visiting Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He holds a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and is a former Visiting Scholar of Wolfson College, Cambridge. His scholarship has appeared in the journals such as Anamnesis , Clio , Economic Affairs , The European Journal of Sociology , Kierkegaard Research , Politics and Religion and The Review of Politics . He is a contributor to The Point , a magazine founded on the suspicion that modern life is worth examining.
Eric R. Lybeck is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Manchester Institute of Education at the University of Manchester. Working in the emerging field of Critical University Studies, his work draws on processual and civic approaches to social knowledge and practices to make new connections between the disciplines of sociology and education. His doctoral research at Cambridge explored the history of the social and legal sciences during the late nineteenth-century transfer of university models from Germany to America. He is currently editor-in-chief of the journal Civic Sociology , which is published by University of California Press.
Steven M. Tipton is Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus at Emory University and author of Public Pulpits: Methodists and Mainline Churches in the Moral Argument of Public Life (2007) and The Life to Come: Re-Creating Retirement (2018). He is also the coauthor of Habits of the Heart and The Good Society .
John Torpey is Presidential Professor of Sociology and History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is also the Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. He is the author of several books in the fields of comparative-historical and political sociology, including most recently The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental (2017). He was a student of Robert Bellah’s while pursuing his doctoral degree at the University of California, Berkeley.
INTRODUCTION: ON BEING A SCHOLAR AND AN INTELLECTUAL
Matteo Bortolini 1

If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?
Dōgen
Intellectuals are people who work with ideas to make a living. 2 They create ideas. They compare ideas. They revise ideas. Sometimes they discard their ideas and replace them with better, or just different, ones. When they are confident enough—or when other concerns compel them to do so—intellectuals cast their ideas in the form of a text and publish it. Whenever they enter a space of attention, their ideas, their texts and their gestures are framed by their peers, audiences and critics according to a complex web of distinctions. The originality of their theses, the soundness of their method, the flow of their texts from premise to conclusions, the aesthetics of their prose, the quality of their performance—everything is dissected and ranked vis à vis other ideas, methods, styles and performances. As a consequence, hierarchies arise, consolidate and then crumble.
Far from being a distortion of the “free circulation of ideas,” this play of distinctions occupies the center