Abstract
This essay uses the life of Robert Bellah to pose questions about the unfolding of ambition in academic settings with explicit, quasi-universalistic ranking. A crucial moment in all careers is the moment when one recognizes that there are many more talented than oneself. This moment is likely to come earlier for those in elite tracks, which enables such people to prepare various defensive strategies, which can prove advantageous at later and possibly more significant competitions.
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Notes
Compare W. I. Thomas’s letter refusing to write an autobiographical article for Kimball Young in 1930, after having produced the most important sociological monograph of his era. Thomas wrote “I don’t regard myself as important, I don’t want to be noticed. I don’t care whether a word appears about me in print living or dead.” (See Abbott and Egloff 2008:19, FN 4).
The quote is from a blurb on the dust jacket of Bortolini’s book.
To be sure, Bellah’s own life, as presented by Bortolini, is not much of an advertisement for Dewey’s hopes for a “common faith.” But one does wonder whether Bellah ever read Dewey seriously. Bellah’s sociological “father” (he lost his own father to suicide when only three) was Talcott Parsons, whose ignoring of the pragmatists was as complete as it is inexplicable. Yet much of what Bortolini finds important in Bellah’s sociology of religion – from “symbolic realism” to the importance of play to the idea of perpetually renewed and diversified religious experience – is old news to those who have read Thomas, Mead, James, and Dewey.
One of the clearest signs of this ambition is that from early on, he preserved minute records of his own life in a way that only very ambitious (and very obsessional) people do.
To be sure, the first of these moves was occasioned in part by political oppression, but there were other ways to solve that problem than by moving the family to Canada.
All page numbers in this format refer to Bortolini’s book.
On p. 81, the three-year-old daughter tells her father, recently returned from an overseas junket, to “go back to Egypt.” Apparently, this hostility became a family joke.
There are a few works on personal ambition. Among the most interesting is Hermanowicz 1998.
The argument actually applies to all forms of ambition. but academic ambition is the case at hand.
I propose this idealized trajectory largely as a native informant, someone taught by scholars of Bellah’s generation. It should be noted that because academia was nearly all male at the time, this idealized trajectory was automatically conflated with gender. Its transformation by the general gender revolution of the years after 1970 is beyond the scope of this paper.
Indeed, one could treat noticing this experience as a crucial indicator of ambition. Ambitious people will devote more notice to the question of whether students around them are beyond their level.
Robert Frank’s (1985) Choosing the Right Pond reinterpreted the famous insult (“big frog in a small puddle”) in strategic terms.
As Bortolini makes clear, Bellah to a considerable extent avoided teaching. One suspects his early teaching prize at Berkeley reflected his alignment with students’ political beliefs. Bortolini reports numbers of complaints by Bellah about the weight of his teaching. A Berkeley graduate once reported to me that by age sixty, Bellah was “completely checked out.”
The phrase is actually Bortolini’s, but he is paraphrasing a Bellah Journal entry or (possibly) a personal communication from Bellah (p. 48).
AGIL is an acronym Parsons gave for the four functions he believed were necessary for any system.
The discussion of this matter is on pp. 75 − 6. Confirmation of Bellah’s strong self-opinion by the surrounding Harvard environment (other than Moore) is emphasized on 76.
There are fifteen reviews of the book currently (January 2023) in JSTOR. Thirteen are in English and two in French. I report here on the consensus across all fifteen. I have reread the book myself for this paper and agree with the reviews. The book is an interesting foray of Parsonianism into Japanese religion, but no specialist of the time would find anything genuinely surprising in it. Its claim to importance thus relies completely on the importance of AGIL Otherwise, it is a fine review of secondary sources with a small intervention into the study of one particular religious group, already somewhat studied in Japanese language sources.
The citation verdict came early as well. Like Geertz, Erving Goffman was vastly more productive than Bellah, although his PhD came only two years earlier. As of 1970, Goffman had 260 Web of Science citations to Geertz’s 166 and Bellah’s 102. And the citations since 1973 (moving the date to make sure that Geertz’s Interpretations of Culture is counted in order to balance Bellah’s Beyond Belief) certainly bear out the IAS dcision. In Web of Science, Geertz’s publications through 1973 have about 18,000 citations to today (January 2023). Bellah’s have about 4,300. And Goffman’s citations are well beyond Geertz’s. Even taking into account the self-fulfilling aspect of the matter (i.e., that Bellah’s not getting the IAS job reduced his visibility), posterity’s verdict is clear.
References
Abbott, A., & Egloff, R. (2008). The Polish Peasant in Oberlin and Chicago. American Sociologist, 39, 217–258.
Bortolini, M. (2021). A Joyfully Serious Man. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Frank, R. (1985). Choosing the Right Pond. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hermanowicz, J. (1998). The Stars are not enough. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Abbott, A. Academic Ambition. Am Soc 54, 524–534 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-023-09579-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-023-09579-y