Abstract
The so-called “Bellah affair at Princeton” began in March 1973 when a harsh but nonetheless ordinary academic fight over the appointment of Robert N. Bellah as a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton found its way to the wider public sphere. Using published and unpublished evidence, the paper shows how two different interpretations of academic freedom were put forward by Bellah’s supporters and opponents, and how the sociological profession understood the episode as a disciplinary attack on the part of the hard sciences and historical disciplines. The emerging symbolic constellation led all the relevant actors to develop a shared interest in the rapid oblivion of the episode: the Bellah affair became a lose-lose game which all the players wanted to end as rapidly as possible.
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Notes
On November 6, 2009 I used the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to look at Bellah’s homepage, maintained by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, as it looked like on September 24, 2003. See: http://web.archive.org/web/20031001181606/www.robertbellah.com/index.html.
The Institute’s schools correspond to academic departments.
Wrigley confirmed the information I got from Kaysen (2008) in a personal communication, December 24, 2008.
In 1965, as Alex Inkeles was starting to put into question the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations, Bellah had played with the idea of creating “a new Department of Religion” at Harvard (Bellah to Parsons, June 5, 1965, TPP, HUGFP 42.8.8 Box 3). Harvard’s Department of Sociology eventually split from Social Relations in 1970 (Johnston 1998). Bellah’s efforts for “the establishment of a bona fide department [of religion] at Berkeley with several new faculty members” are recalled in Pearson 1999: 304. For a fair assessment of this phase of Bellah’s work see Segal 1989.
The members of the social sciences program during the academic year 1972–1973 were Pierre Bourdieu, Clive Kessler, Bruce Mazlish, Thomas Dunbar Moodie, Nancy Munn, James T. Siegel, Peter Hopkinson Smith, Aristide Zolberg, and Albert O. Hirschman. Paul Rabinow was at the Institute as a visitor and assistant to Geertz (Institute for Advanced Study 1980). Since some of the people involved are still alive, the IAS Archives did not grant me the possibility to see the papers pertaining to the Bellah affair. While Professor White declined to add anything to what he wrote in his memoir (personal communication, September 27, 2008), the testimonies I collected from some of the junior members of the Social Science program during the academic year 1972–1973 (Moodie, Kessler, Zolberg, Rabinow) did not add much from a descriptive point of view.
See Riesman to Bellah, November 30, 1971, and Bellah to Riesman, December 14, 1971 (DRP, HUGFP 99.16, Box 8). In fact, in a letter to Parsons dated September 6, 1972 (TPP, HUGFP 42.8.4, Box 12), Bellah wrote that “Cliff [Geertz had] spoken of the possibility of my coming here permanently almost from the time he came himself.”
Se also Riesman to Bellah, November 29, 1972, and Bellah to Riesman, December 20, 1972 (DRP, HUGFP 99.8, Box 5).
Apart from local-academic considerations, it is not hard to explain why Morton White took such a leading role in fighting Bellah’s appointment. White’s and Bellah’s views on the study and the teaching of religion in higher education were almost opposite. As many of his essays from the late 1960s and early 1970s show, according to Bellah any religion had to be understood in its own terms through “symbolic realism,” a deep hermeneutic of those “constitutive symbols” which represent the unity of subject and object in ultimate terms. Social scientists might understand religion only if they apprehended its symbols as religious subjects themselves would do; this also meant that there was no big difference between teaching about religion and the teaching of religion (see Bellah 1970b, c). On his part, White had advanced the idea that it was meaningless to speak of “religion” or “religious symbols” in abstract terms. The right question to ask, then, was not “Should I be religious?”—a question which, according to White, was typical of coeval religious intellectuals of which Paul Tillich, one of Bellah’s mentors, was a typical example,—but “should I be a Jew/Christian/Muslim?” Two conclusions followed: first, cognitive questions remained paramount in the study of religion; and, second, teaching about religion was never to be confused with teaching to be religious (see White 1959: 85–97; White 1999: 160).
Kaysen to Merton, November 6, 1972, p. 1 (RKMP; see Appendix).
Ironically, Kaysen did not seek advice from Talcott Parsons, who had mentored both Geertz and Bellah, since Parsons’ style of work “did not appeal” to him (Kaysen 2008). Merton had been a member of the ad hoc committee nominated in 1969 to review Geertz’s appointment (see Kaysen to Merton, January 7, 1970, RKMP).
Both the unsigned statement titled “Program in Social Change” and Geertz’s “The Work of Robert N. Bellah” have been recovered from Robert K. Merton’s papers at Columbia University (see Appendix). The program statement clearly bears the imprints of both Geertz’s professional training at the Department of Social Relations at Harvard and his experience as a member, from 1962 to 1970, of the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations at the University of Chicago (see Geertz 1995; Shweder and Good 2005). The two documents confirm the retrospective interpretation put forth by Landon Y. Jones, Jr. in The Atlantic Monthly in 1974. According to Jones (1974: 52), Kaysen and Geertz had tried to subvert the isolation typical of IAS professors in order to create the School of Social Sciences as a true community of scholars. According to this plan, “new criteria were being injected into the selection process—that Bellah be able to work with Geertz, that they together fill a social need for new knowledge in the area of comparative social change, that the new program needed this particular man to succeed.” Kaysen and Geertz had somehow “covered” their wider project—which was, in fact, an attempt to modify the very structure of the IAS—claiming that they had used “the same standards of scholarship applied to professors in other schools” in picking Bellah. See also Riesman to Bellah, November 30, 1971 (DRP, HUGFP 99.8, Box 5): “You should make use of the rare opportunity to work together with Cliff Geertz—there are so few such opportunities, and we must reject the individualism which does not take such non-kin connections seriously enough (…) I see the two of you together changing the style of at least part of the Institute away from solipsism.”
See Harold F. Linder (Chairman of the Board of Trustees) to the Members of the Faculty, IAS Princeton, January 20, 1973, and Harold F. Linder, “Memorandum to the Faculty,” IAS Princeton, January 30, 1973 (TPP, HUGFP 42.8.8, Box 7). The appointment was going to be effective from July, 1973. See Kaysen to Bellah, January 31, 1973 (TPP, HUGFP 42.8.8, Box 2) and Bellah to Riesman, February 19, 1973 (DRP, HUGFP 99.8, Box 5).
The expression was used in Shenker 1973a.
In a later Washington Post article, Weil declared: “I sent Bellah a note and I said that I knew very few persons in the academic world who would accept an appointment under such circumstances. I have told I cannot regard him as a colleague” (Chapman 1973).
Weil to unnamed Harvard professor, January 29, 1973, p. 3 (RKMP). About the University of Oslo in 1941–1943 see Mees 2008: 245.
Shenker was a well-known reporter at the New York Times, who specialized in cultural and scholarly-informed articles and interviews. See Fox 2007.
Shenker’s NYT articles presented evaluations on Bellah’s work that might be sorted into four categories: formal judgments by the external members of the ad hoc committee; informal opinions by IAS non-members which had been privately consulted by faculty members; formal judgments by IAS faculty members White and Geertz; informal opinions by other IAS faculty members. In a letter to the Atlantic Monthly White (1974) explicitly stated that he had no part in giving Shenker the confidential materials that made their way to print.
NYT readers were told that White and Geertz had presented lengthy reviews of Bellah’s work (Shenker 1973a), but almost nothing more was said about the two reports.
While the motivations of Bellah’s opponents have always been interpreted as strictly local, Weil’s comment points to the wider context of political and ethical disputes surrounding the societal role of scientists. As Kelly Moore (2008: 3) has shown, after a couple of decades in which “the authority of scientists to make unchallenged claims about nature and about their relationship to public political life” had risen extraordinarily, in the late 1960s and early 1970s their involvement with the government and, more generally, with political issues had been subjected to profound scrutiny. It could not be wrong to consider this wider cultural climate as, at least, an intervening factor in the Bellah affair (see, for example, Irving L. Horowitz’ interpretation of the political side of the episode, infra). This said, the IAS members’ complex and diverse political and moral positions, as well as the public vicissitudes of former members such as Einstein or Oppenheimer and their influence on the outlook of later members could be a legitimate object of study in themselves. On the matter see also Shapin 2008; Haney 2008.
In her book, How Professors Think?, Michèle Lamont shows how the interaction between panelists in interdisciplinary committees granting scholarships and research awards is guided by customary norms such as disciplinary sovereignty and cognitive contextualization. According to the former, “panelists’ opinions generally are given more weight according to how closely the proposal overlaps ‘their’ field,” while the latter “requires that panelists use the criteria of evaluation most appropriate for the field or discipline of the proposal under review” (Lamont 2009: 118 and 106). Nowadays, when panel members find an appropriate way to interpret and apply these norms—which may be pretty much equated with the “restricted” view of academic freedom,—the emergence of shared solutions is most likely to occur (ibidem: 156–158). Unfortunately, Lamont does not survey the historical development of these basic rules of academic etiquette nor the dynamics of disciplinary differentiation and legitimation—logically, to be sovereign, a discipline first has to exist and to be recognized as such. In fact, the debates on academic freedom in the early 1970s generally took for granted a strict disciplinary competence in the evaluation a scholar’s performance. In drawing a distinction between “special” and “general” academic freedom, John R. Searle (1975: 88, my italics) underlines that professional academic freedom is justified by the professor’s “special competence in some area of academic study.” See also the papers collected in Pincoffs 1975 for similar views, and Gieryn 1999: 101–111, for some evidence of the fact that these rules were already in use, at least as rhetorical arguments, in the 1940s and the 1960s.
Fairbank to Bellah, March 5, 1973, BPF. In its simplicity, Fairbank’s remark points to the emergence of the social sciences as a “third culture” different from both the natural sciences and the humanities. For an recent essayistic treatment of this topic see Kagan 2009.
Smelser et al. to Bellah, March 8, 1973 (BPF).
Smelser to Bellah, October 16, 1972 (BPF).
Bellah to Riesman, February 19, 1973 (DRP, HUGFP 99.8, Box 5). Bellah had expressed his mixed feelings in a handwritten post scriptum to his letter: “I don’t feel at all good about it and may well return to Berkeley in 1974 if I cannot muster the enthusiasm of playing Captain Dreyfus at the institute for long.” See also Riesman to Bellah, March 14, 1973 (DRP, HUGFP 99.8, Box 5).
Parsons to Bellah, March 8, 1973 (TPP, HUGFP 42.8.8 Box 3).
Raymond A. Schroth, SJ, to Parsons, March 8, 1973, and Parsons to Schroth, March 14, 1973 (TPP, HUGFP 42.45.4 Box 7). The article was eventually published in May 1973, when the Bellah affair was almost over.
Later Parsons accepted Bellah’s and Geertz’ request to write a letter to the Board of trustees supporting their decision: see Bellah to Parsons, April 6, 1973 (TPP, HUGFP 42.8.8 Box 3), and Parsons to the IAS Board of trustees, April 24, 1973 (TPP, HUGFP 42.8.8, Box 7).
Riesman to Reischauer, March 14, 1973 (DRP, HUGFP 99.8, Box 5). At the same time, Bellah’s recognition within relevant disciplinary circles was never endangered by what was happening on the newspapers. In fact, the early 1970s were a crucial moment for his career. Thanks to his essay, “Civil Religion in America,” Bellah (1967) was becoming a famed intellectual. Although his ideas were heavily criticized, he was never personally attacked and not one of his critics ever raised the question of his intellectual fitness. Noted historians and sociologists who reviewed his work always treated it with fairness, respect, and, sometimes, enthusiasm (see, among others, Brogan et al. 1968; Moltmann 1970; Gladden 1971; Greeley 1971; Cherry 1972; Weigert 1972; Lynn 1973). During the very days in which the Princeton affair was exploding, Bellah participated to a conference at Drew University from which an important book was drawn. American Civil Religion, published in 1974, established Bellah’s status as an authority in American studies along with respected figures as Will Herberg, Sidney E. Mead, and W. Lloyd Warner (Richey and Jones 1974; Mathisen 1989; Bortolini 2011). Bellah’s rising standing had its consequences from an academic point of view as well. As his friends and acquaintances knew, not only had Berkeley prolonged Bellah’s leave for another year to give him time to think about a return to the University of California, but he had informally discussed the possibility of his becoming a Benjamin Franklin Professor with key persons at the University of Pennsylvania (Bellah 2007; Renee Fox, who was the chair of the Department of Sociology at the time, confirmed this fact in a personal communication, October 8, 2009). In private correspondence, Bellah had anticipated that he would have probably stayed at the IAS for a full year, waiting for a fourth permanent appointment at the School of Social Sciences to be made, and then leave for Philadelphia. See Bellah to Parsons, March 12, 1973 (TPP, HUGFP 42.8.4, Box 12).
In his book on modern scientists, Steven Shapin (2008) surveys the professional publications for industry and applied scientists in search of their worldview and self-interpretation. In this sense, The American Sociologist is interesting because it published (and publishes) both empirical research articles on sociology and informed opinions on it. It is, thus, a source of both facts and outlooks on the discipline that American sociologists may read—and thus might be said to constitute a reflexive background of their view of the discipline.
Bernard to the Editor, Footnotes, March 12, 1973 (RKMP). The letter was eventually published in the May issue of Footnotes (Bernard 1973).
It is obviously impossible to assess the impact of the news about the IAS quarrel on the general public back in 1973. In personal communications Rabinow, Siegel, Moodie, Zolberg, and Kessler (see note 6) confirmed my impression about the IAS “insiders” of the Program of social science. Moreover, it has remained the standard interpretation of the episode in subsequent literature: even excluding the accounts made by some of the protagonists of the Bellah affair (Kaysen 1976; Geertz 1995; White 1999), reports such as an essay written by the historian of mathematics and philosopher, Joong Fang (1975), and Ed Regis’ Who Got Einstein’s Office? (Regis 1987) underlined the hubris of mathematicians and historians, and their unjustified claim at judging a sociologist. In a Bellah profile published on Psychology Today, Sam Keen and T. George Harris (1976: 60) attributed the “savage attack” to the fact that “hard scientists, once the high priests of Western life, feel more and more threatened by the rise of the soft sciences that study man.”
This means that it could have an effect only on Bellah’s recognition and renown, but not on the “Bellah affair” properly.
It should be remembered that, apart from the two unpublished White memorandums, the IAS dissident majority only presented generic arguments against Bellah. Horowitz was not the only commentator to suggest that his ideas about American civil religion were one of the main reasons of their virulent opposition to his appointment (Hill 1973; Parsons 1973; but see Weil 1973).
On the contrary, almost no one challenged Geertz’ wisdom.
Weil to Merton, March 3, 1973 (RKMP). Merton also received a letter from George D. Rostow, who forwarded him the letter of protest that five distinguished Yale mathematicians had sent Kaysen.
Transcript of a telephone call between Merton and Kaysen, March 5, 1973 (RKMP). See Appendix, document 4, for Merton’s original letter.
See Shils to Merton, May 29, 1973 (RKMP).
The brief NYT article announcing the appointment said that “opposed by the faculty majority, which questioned his scholarship, Professor Bellah had asked that his appointment be withdrawn” (n.w.a. 1974).
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Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Robert Bellah, the late Carl Kaysen, Harriet Zuckerman, Andrea Cossu, Gary A. Fine, Marcel Fournier, Renée C. Fox, Neil Gross, Irving L. Horowitz, Clive Kessler, Victor M. Lidz, Larry T. Nichols, Jennifer Platt, and Aristide and Vera Zolberg for their suggestions and kind words.
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I will use the following abbreviations throughout the paper: IAS (Institute for Advanced Study); n.w.a. (no writer attributed); NYT (the New York Times); BPF (Robert Bellah’s personal files, Berkeley, CA); RKMP (Robert K. Merton papers, Columbia University Archives, 1930-2003 MS# 1439. Series II Correspondence, Sub-series Alphabetical 1930-2003, box 41, folder 4, series II.1 “The Institute for Advanced Study, 1970-1985”); TPP (Talcott Parsons papers, Harvard University Archives, HUGFP 42.8.8, Series Correspondence, box 3, folder “Bellah, Robert”; HUGFP 42.45.4, Series Writing, Publishing, and Speaking, box 7, folder “Commonweal April 1973, Article on Bellah”); DRP (David Riesman papers, Harvard University Archives, HUGFP 99.8 Series Correspondence, box 5, folder “Correspondence with Bellah”; and HUGFP 99.12 Series Correspondence, box 1, folder “Correspondence with Bellah”).
Permission to publish excerpts from unpublished documents has been granted by Robert Bellah, Hildred Geertz, Carl Kaysen, Michael Riesman, Harriet Zuckerman, Columbia University Archives, and Harvard University Archives.
Appendix
Appendix
Documents Pertaining to the “Bellah Affair”: 1972–1973
Source of all documents: Robert K. Merton papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, 1930–2003 MS# 1439. Series II Correspondence, Sub-series Alphabetical 1930–2003, box 41, folder 4, series II.1 “The Institute for Advanced Study, 1970–1985.”
Extended research in Robert K. Merton’s archives housed at the Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library has led to the uncovering of some interesting documental material related to the “Bellah affair” at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The four documents have been arranged in chronological order. The first document is the official letter sent by Carl Kaysen to Merton to invite him to be a member of the ad hoc review committee (November 6, 1972). Since much of the discussion following the episode started from dissenting opinions about the weight of the outside experts’ judgment, the letter is important because it clearly expresses the terms of the request the IAS made to the members of the ad hoc committee. Clifford Geertz’s presentation of Bellah’s work and the unsigned presentation of the program on “Social Change” (October 4, 1972) were sent to the members of the ad hoc committee along with their letter of invitation. These two documents describe the plans Kaysen and Geertz had for the School of Social Sciences at the IAS, and somehow confirm the impression, on the part of the “dissenting majority,” of a significant departure from the traditional individualistic and loosely-knit style of the IAS (see paper, note 13). Since the meeting between the ad hoc committee and the faculty committee ended without a clear consensus on Bellah’s standing as a social scientist, Kaysen asked the external members to put their evaluations on paper. Document four reproduces Merton’s letter to Kaysen (December 9, 1972). Despite the original promise of confidentiality, the letters were shown to the press and made their way to the first page of the New York Times.
Permission to publish the documents has been granted by professors Hildred Geertz, the late Carl Kaysen, and Harriet Zuckerman. I would like to thank them all for their help and kindness. I also gracefully acknowledge professor Zuckerman’s help with more mundane matters.
Matteo Bortolini
University of Padua, Italy
Document 1. Letter from Carl Kaysen to Robert K. Merton inviting him to be a member of the Ad Hoc Committee (November 6, 1972), 3 pages.
November 6, 1972
[handwritten: Bob:]
I write to confirm my invitation to you to serve as a member of a small Ad Hoc Committee to advise on the appointment of a second professor in the new Program in Social Science at the Institute. The first and present one is Clifford Geertz. The nominee is Robert Bellah, now Ford Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His curriculum vitae, bibliography, and an appreciation of his work by Professor Geertz are attached. The marked items in the bibliography constitute a representative selection of Bellah’s most important work.
Bellah is being considered as the second professor, in a group which may soon reach four, in the study of social change. The common element in the program is the application of the analytical methods of the social sciences to the study of historical material. A brief description of the program is attached. At present, as you may know, the Institute has three schools—corresponding to departments in the more usual terminology—Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Historical Studies. The Institute combines the support of research of its permanent members and senior visitors with post-doctoral training for junior visitors. Its functioning is described in the pamphlet attached, which also lists the current Faculty and shows the Visiting Members.
[end of page 1]
The Committee consists of five distinguished scholars who will be asked to assist the Faculty in making a judgment as to the quality of Bellah’s work and his ability to contribute to the proposed program. The Faculty hopes that the members of the Committee will evaluate the work of Bellah in relation to that of other scholars active in similar fields. New professorial appointments in the existing Schools are made on the recommendation of the Faculty of the particular School. In making an appointment in a new area, the Faculty felt it was wise to seek the advice of outside scholars of stature and relevant competence. The Committee will not be asked to make a formal report as such, but the individual members will be asked for their views which they may express when they are here in Princeton or in writing.
The Committee will meet Sunday, December 3, with a small committee of the Faculty including Professor Geertz and myself. The meeting will begin approximately at 10:30 a.m. and last through lunch and for a short time thereafter. I think we can plan to finish our business by three o’clock. I recognize that this request makes a non-trivial demand on your time and energies, but I trust you will find the importance of the purpose justifies it. The Institute, of course, will bear any expenses that you incur in connection with your membership on the Committee and will arrange for your stay in Princeton. Mrs. Bortell of my office will be glad to assist you in making transportation arrangements.
The proposed nomination of Mr. Bellah is still confidential, and I trust you will treat both your knowledge of it and your membership in the Committee with discretion.
Please do not hesitate to call me (collect) if you have any questions.
Sincerely yours
[signature: Carl Kaysen]
Carl Kaysen
Professor Robert Merton
Department of Sociology
415 Fayerweather Hall
Columbia University
New York, New York 10027
[end of page 2]
Members of the Ad Hoc Committee to advise on the proposed appointment of Robert N. Bellah
STANLEY CAVELL
Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University
JOSEPH M. KITAGAWA
Professor of History of Religion, University of Chicago
ROBERT K. MERTON
Professor of Sociology, Columbia University
EDWIN O. REISCHAUER
University Professor (Japanese History), Harvard University
EDWARD SHILS
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
Meeting December 3, 1972
10:30 A.M.
Board Room
Institute for Advanced Study
Document 2. Clifford Geertz’s presentation of Robert Bellah’s work to the Ad Hoc Committee (October 4, 1972), 4 pages
THE WORK OF ROBERT N. BELLAH
Bellah’s work has been mainly in the sociology of religion as a theoretical field, the comparative study of religion and ideology in modernizing societies, and the social and cultural history of Japan. He continues to be active in all of these fields with current emphases that will be mentioned below.
Starting from Talcott Parsons’ interpretation of European tradition of the sociology of religion represented in France by Emile Durkheim, in Germany by Max Weber, Bellah has viewed religion as a system of symbols by means of which individual personalities are organized and social life sustained. His earlier work on religious evolution (Beyond Belief, Chapter 2), which has stimulated scholarly study in a number of fields, dealt with the changing structure of religion in societies at different levels of social complexity. More recently he has become concerned with the nature of religious symbol systems and the ways in which they differ from other kinds of symbol systems (Beyond Belief, Part III) and is planning a general book on the place of religion in human action focusing on the unique features of religious symbols.
As part of his comparative study of religion and ideology in modernizing societies he has contributed studies dealing with Japan, China and the Islamic world (Beyond Belief, Part II) as well as a general typology (Epilogue to Religion and Progress in Modern Asia). In these studies together with his book on early modern Japan (Tokugawa Religion) he was interested in the contribution of religion and ideology to the process of modernization. More recently he has become interested in what pre-modern religions, by providing images of man and the world different from those dominant in the contemporary West, may have to offer to the attempt of modern societies to solve their problems.
In 1967 Bellah published an essay, “Civil Religion in America” (Beyond Belief, Chapter 9), that applied some of his general thinking about the role of religion in developing countries to the American case. This essay has been widely reprinted and has stimulated considerable scholarly discussion and research. As a result of this interest Bellah was asked to expand the earlier essay in giving the Weil Lectures at Hebrew Union College in the fall of 1971. That manuscript is now in the [end of page 1] process of revision and expansion and will be published as The Deepest Day: Studies in the Mythic Dimension of American Culture. It will emphasize the many forms in which the eschatological note has been sounded in America and the variety of ways in which American history has been interpreted as salvation history.
In an effort to understand better the phenomenon known as the counter-culture in America, Bellah is working with Charles Y. Glock of the University of California at Berkeley in a study of youth and student religious consciousness in the San Francisco Bay Area. The research staff consists of six or seven graduate students who are conducting participant observation studies of various religious groups and are collaborating to prepare a questionnaire survey to be administered by the Survey Research Center of the University of California to a sample of persons between the ages of 18 and 30 in the Bay Area. The collaboration of Bellah and Glock and their students is intended to produce a more sensitive survey instrument than those usually employed in this field. The entire study is designed to provide a better empirical base to generalizations about youth culture in America today.
Bellah has long been interested in the history of sociology and of modern European social thought both for their own sake and as examples of cultural innovation in modernizing societies. He has been particularly interested in Emile Durkheim, publishing an essay on “Durkheim and History” in 1959. He has recently completed a critical reading of all the writings of Durkheim as the basis for a volume of selections to be published in the Heritage of Sociology Series of the University of Chicago Press. Five of the selections are translated for the first time and Bellah has provided the book with a substantial introduction which is a short intellectual biography of Durkheim.
Recently Bellah has become interested in modern Italy; and he has joined a number of American and Western European historians and social scientists, who are not specialists on Italy, in taking a look at modern Italian society. Bellah’s assignment is in the area of religion and ideology. Among other things he is interested in exploring some of the parallels between modern Italian and modern Japanese thought—the influence of German idealism, the influence of Marxism—especially as they relate to the ethos of fascism in the two countries.
The area of Bellah’s primary specialization is Japan, and Japanese is the only oriental language that he uses regularly, although he has studied Chinese and Arabic. His first major research in the Japan field [end of page two] dealt with the Tokugawa Period (1600–1868) and applied an analogy to Max Weber’s thesis about the role of Protestantism in Europe to early modern Japan. The book Tokugawa Religion which resulted from this study describes the place of religion and values in traditional Japanese society and their implications for the economy and the polity. The book also contains a detailed study based on primary materials of a merchant class religious and ethical movement, Shingaku.
Subsequently Bellah has become interested in the fate of traditional Japanese values, ethics and worldview in the modern century. As a way in to this study he has been interested in a series of leading Japanese interpreters of Japanese culture and history, men who have influenced the modern Japanese sense of Japan. In 1965 he published two studies of such men, one of Watsuji Tetsuro an one on Ienaga Saburo. He is presently at work on a more substantial study of one of the most influential of modern Japanese intellectuals, Miki Kiyoshi. Miki began his scholarly life as a disciple of Japan’s leading modern philosopher, Nishida Kitaro, in the ambience of German idealism and existentialism, as well as Japanese Buddhist philosophy. Miki’s first book was on Pascal, to whom he turned in Paris after spending a year in Germany where Heidegger was his private tutor. Returning to Japan in the middle [19]20’s Miki soon became one of the leading interpreters of Marxism. His humanistic and sophisticated Marxism is easily the most creative Japanese work done in that tradition even up to the present time. In the late [19]30’s Miki and other former leftists became part of the brain trust of Prince Konoe, the last prime minister before Tojo, and drew up some documents that became the key ideological statements of Japan’s wartime ideology. Late in the war Miki was arrested for hiding a Communist in his house and died in prison. Miki’s last unfinished work, written in prison, was concerned with Shinran, the greatest Japanese figure in the Pure Land Buddhist tradition. Miki’s life and work was a microcosm of of the chief trends in Japanese thought and culture between 1920 and 1945 and provides an excellent point of entry into the study of modern Japanese culture.
Bellah’s interests still span the traditional and modern phases of Japanese development as two recent essays, “Continuity and Change in Japanese Society” and “Intellectual and Society in Japan” show. He has just begun a collaboration with three historians of Japan, [Tetsuo] Najita, [Harry D.] Harootunian and [Irwin] Scheiner, to develop an interpretive understanding of the underlying structure of Japanese culture. The group plans an analysis of key texts in Japanese social and political thought from the 18th to the early 20th centuries, as well as the analysis of patterns of religious and social ritual and other stylized [end of page 3] interactions from the same period. All four have worked on both Tokugawa and modern Japan but from differing angles. Najita has worked on Neo-Confucian thinkers and Harootunian on Shinto thinkers both mainly of samurai and wealthy peasant background; Bellah has worked on middle level merchants and Scheiner on the ethos and social movements of peasants. It is hoped that the group will begin to discern not only what is distinctly Japanese but some of the main axes of variation within the traditional culture and eventually the fate of these variations in the last one hundred years.
RELATION OF BELLAH’S WORK TO THE SOCIAL SCIENCE PROGRAM
The importance of Robert Bellah’s work, taken as a whole, lies in its contribution to what has been one of the major concerns of sociology since its inception: the effects of ideas on social behavior. He has sought to avoid both the materialist reductionism of the Marxist tradition, in which systems of thought tend to disolve [sic] into mere epiphenomena of supposedly harder realities, and the idealist reductionism of the Hegelian tradition, which they tend to turn into autonomous objects floating free of historical contexts and social roots.
As in traditional societies—and notably in the pre- and early-modern Japan that has been Bellah’s main scholarly focus—religion tends to be the major locus of systematic thought, his work in that field needs to be seen in the context of his broader concern: how comes it that mere ideas have so powerful an effect on the course of social evolution. His more recent interest in American religious ideas is but an extension of his central interest, and promises to change radically our conceptions both of what Americans believe and what difference it makes.
For a program dedicated to clarifying the processes of social change, now and in the past, and all too likely, given the general character of social science research in the United States, to fall into a mechanistic view of things, Bellah is an invaluable addition.
I have known and worked with Robert Bellah for 20 years. Though his work has been more on the level of the structure and development of idea systems as such and mine on the way in which ideas are embodied in concrete sociological, political and economic processes, our interests are fully complementary. There is no social scientists in the country for whom I have more respect and no one whom I should more wish to have associated with me in developing our program in the determining years immediately ahead.
CLIFFORD GEERTZ
October 4, 1972
Document 3. Unsigned presentation of the Program on “Social Change” at the Institute for Advanced Study to the Ad Hoc Committee (October 4, 1972), 4 pages
PROGRAM IN SOCIAL CHANGE
The Institute’s new Program in Social Change aims to combine the intellectual resources of the social sciences and history to examine systematically the processes of social change. A grasp of the determinants of the direction and pace of historical change is the central problem of understanding society. How institutions, ideas, attitudes, and feelings evolve and change; why some changes are slow and evolutionary, some rapid, revolutionary and violent; why some new cultures and new religions remain the possession of a few and others spread across large parts of the world are puzzles which have always excited the curiosity and speculation of historians and philosophers of history. Only in the last generation has the systematic application of the concepts of the social sciences—especially those of sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, and demography—begun to provide the analytical tools for a systematic attack on these problems. Further, the new relation between the European and the non-European world has both provided new materials for the study of social change and a renewed incentive for its intensive examination. The disintegration of the colonial system and the rapid emergence on the world stage of nearly 100 new nations since the end of the war has stimulated the study of non-Western societies, in both current and historical terms. The interest of the industrialized Western countries in the economic development of the formerly colonial areas of the world, as well as in political and economic development in Russia and China has provided a further stimulus in this direction. These stimuli have affected all the social sciences and led them to new topics of study. In turn, these have led the same disciplines to look at the more familiar materials [end of page 1] of Western societies in new perspectives, and to use them for new purposes. At the same time, many historians have become more analytic in their intellectual orientation, and they are less ready to see the simple reconstruction of the past “as it really was” as an appropriate definition of the aim of their discipline, and more ready to use the methods and categories of the analytic social sciences in addressing themselves to historical materials. The goal of all of these studies is an understanding of the forces which shape the direction, pace, and character of change in human societies.
A variety of methods is applicable to examining this range of problems. Both sociologists and historians have traditionally relied heavily on an institutional approach, examining changing structures and functions, overt and latent, of major social institutions. This remains an important mode of dealing with social change. In recent years there has been an increasing use of quantitative methods, in which economic history and sociology have led the way, and social history and other disciplines have followed. Quantification is significant for the systematic analysis of large bodies of materials, and for the more precise specification of explanatory hypotheses. But there remain problems to which quantitative methods do not now seem applicable, especially in the realm of the history of belief systems, attitudes, feelings, and ideas, where qualitative modes of analysis are desirable. The crux of the whole process of social change appears to lie in the nature of the interaction of changes in social beliefs, attitudes and ideas with those of changes in institutions. The time scales involved in the two kinds of processes appear to show an essential difference: that for the former seem to be capable of much greater compression than for the latter. Yet our insight into the circumstances under which these rapid [end of page 2] shifts in attitudes and ideas occur and their consequences is still limited, and these problems demand much further thought and work.
Neither the materials nor the methodologies for an attack on the whole range of problems presented by the study of social change are the possession of any one discipline or university department. Indeed, disciplinary divisions and departmental boundaries in the social sciences are quite artificial, as are boundaries between the several social sciences and history. They reflect the particular traditions of the growth of these disciplines, and often the quite parochial traditions of particular academic institutions.
What is most needed in addressing these problems is the opportunity for the best minds at work on these questions to interchange ideas, stimulate each other, and bring together the perspectives of different disciplines and different specialties. The Institute, with its devotion to research and informal study at the postdoctoral levels, free from course work, the limitations and responsibilities of traditional academic departments, and the distractions of dealing with unwilling students, is ideally suited to providing the opportunity.
The method of operation which the Institute has long practiced—of which it was indeed he pioneer in this country—is exactly suited to the task. In its established programs, it brings together a small group of distinguished permanent professors with a larger group of visiting members, drawn from universities in the United States and all over the world. The visitors have been about equally divided between younger scholars, still in the apprenticeship stage, although past their formal graduate work and final degree, and more established senior men. For the 40 years of its existence the Institute has followed this pattern with great success. It [end of page 3] permits the work of a small group of permanent faculty to influence the stream of thought throughout the whole academic world from which the visitors come and to which they return.
The new Program in Social Change follows the same mode of operation. It was begun because it fitted in with the criteria that have always governed the work of the Institute. First, the work is intellectually exciting and of the highest quality. Second, it is organizationally suited to the Institute, in the sense that a few first-rate minds could make a significant contribution. It is necessary to have neither a large team effort nor facilities in the sense of laboratories and large numbers of technicians, nor a large number of graduate students. Third, the intellectual state of the field is such that an effort by the Institute can make a special contribution to its development. It is precisely in a period of rapid intellectual change in which conventional disciplinary boundaries are no longer appropriate to the way in which interesting problems are posed and solved that a small group of first-rate men free from the disciplinary constraints imposed by the departmental organization of the conventional university can make a vital contribution, the weight of which is out of all proportion to its size.
Document 4. Robert K. Merton’s letter to Carl Kaysen containing an evaluation of Robert N. Bellah’s work (December 9, 1972), 2 pages.
9 December 1972
Dr Carl Kaysen
Office of the Director
The Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
Dear Carl,
This letter you have asked me to write about Robert Bellah will be mercifully short for I have little to add to the exceedingly prolonged opinions I expressed at the meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee with members of the Institute.
To begin with, we are all agreed, I take it, that Bellah is no latter-day Durkheim or Max Weber. But then, who is? He is, rather, one of the two ablest sociologists of his generation—Shmuel Eisenstadt is the other—now engaged in the comparative study of social change. Bellah has played a pivotal role in this field of inquiry, with special reference to the interaction of religion and other social institutions, from the time of his book on Tokugawa religion. His work has done much to reinstate a greatly needed comparative perspective in contemporary American sociology. I was interested to learn from Professors Reischauer and Kitagawa at the meeting that Bellah’s influence has also been considerable in the field of Japanology.
I shall not comment upon the essays gathered up in Bellah’s book, Beyond Belief, for what is at once the best and the worst of reasons: I have not read most of them. But I have read with some care Bellah’s most recent work: the extended introduction to his forthcoming edition of Durkheim’s writings on morality and society. This is a first-class investigation of the theoretical texture of Durkheim’s sociological corpus. It brings out implications of that body of thought that have escaped the notice of generations of Durkheimian scholars, including so exacting a one as Talcott Parsons. As I noted at our meeting, there are two or three lapses in this deeply informed essay; for one example, the questionable assumption that Durkheim’s interest in psychic phenomena (of self, person, mind and psyche) necessarily meant his accepting the psychological mode of analyzing those phenomena as appropriate. But these are minor (i.e. easily remediable) flaws. Bellah’s essay is much more than deeply informed commentary. It points to new directions of inquiry into normative structures in society and systems of social control.
[end of page 1]
I know nothing at first hand of Bellah’s book now in press or about his work in progress. But I have great respect for Clifford Geertz and his powers of judgment. It therefore weighs heavily with me, as I trust it does with you and your colleagues, that Robert Bellah is, to Cliff’s mind, the social scientist who would do most at this time to advance the development of a school of social science at the Institute.
Sincerely yours,
Robert K. Merton
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Bortolini, M. The “Bellah Affair” at Princeton. Am Soc 42, 3–33 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-011-9120-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-011-9120-7