Sociology as an Art Form

by Robert A. Nisbet

"One of our most original social thinkers," according to the New York Times, Robert Nisbet offers a new approach to sociology. He shows that sociology is indeed an art form, one that has a strong kinship with literature, painting, Romantic history, and philosophy in the nineteenth century, the age in which sociology came into full stature. Sociology as an Art Form is an introduction for the initiated and the uninitiated in so-ciology. Nisbet explains the degree to which sociology draws from the same creative impulses, themes and styles (rooted in history), and actual modes of representa-tion found in the arts. He shows how the founding sociologists such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel constructed portraits (of the bourgeois, the worker, and the intellectual) and landscapes (of the masses, the poor, the factory system), all reflecting and contribut-ing to identical portraits and landscapes found in the literature and art of the period. In addition to marking the similarities between sociologists' and artists' efforts to depict motion or movement, Nisbet emphasizes the relation of sociology to the fin de siecle in art and literature, with examples such as alienation, anomie, and degeneration. He creates an elegant, brilliantly reasoned appraisal of sociology's contribution to modern culture. This book will be of interest to sociologists, artists, and anyone interested in how the fields relate to one another.

162 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 1976

About the author

American sociologist, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Vice-Chancellor at the University of California, Riverside and as the Albert Schweitzer Professor at Columbia University.
After serving in the US Army during World War II, when he was stationed on Saipan in the Pacific theatre, Nisbet founded the Department of Sociology at Berkeley, and was briefly Chairman. Nisbet left an embroiled Berkeley in 1953 to become a dean at the University of California, Riverside, and later a Vice-Chancellor. Nisbet remained in the University of California system until 1972, when he left for the University of Arizona at Tucson. Soon thereafter, he was appointed to the prestigious Albert Schweitzer Chair at Columbia.
On retiring from Columbia in 1978, Nisbet continued his scholarly work for eight years at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. In 1988, President Reagan asked him to deliver the Jefferson Lecture in Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Nisbet's first important work, The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) contended that modern social science's individualism denied an important human drive toward community as it left people without the aid of their fellows in combating the centralizing power of the national state.
Nisbet is seen as follower of Emile Durkheim in the understanding of modern sociocultural systems and their drift. Often identified with the political right, Nisbet began his career as a political liberal but later confessed a conversion to a kind of philosophical Conservatism

Reviews

[Devin Kasparian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Remind me not to read non-fiction from 1976. Listen. This book is 141 pages and took me 2 months to read. I thought my love for Sociology, Art, and the shade of green that’s on the cover of my physical copy of this book would be enough to get through it. I was very wrong. This book is an extended essay that was once published in a sociological journal in 1976 — that was the first red flag I should have listened to. This was such a boring read ... so glad I am done. I NEED a narrative book after this dry experience.

[Miguel Soto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tal como Freud señaló en su momento que de la vida psíquica saben más los artistas que los psicólogos, Nisbet señala lo mismo sobre la vida social humana: los mismos temas que ocupan a los sociologos, ocuparon primero a los artistas, en especial a los románticos.

Partiendo de esto, plantea dos grandes formas de escritura sociológica: el paisaje y el retrato, y con multitud de ejemplos, explica sus cualidades.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nisbet doesn't like systems and abstractions. Instead he likes literary flair. He suggests the latter is essential to all good sociology and provides plenty of examples to boot. Definitely a part of the story, but I think there is still a role for systems somewhere. This is an old book and possibly Nisbet is bending the stick a tad too far against Parsonian structural-functionalism, which is both boring and now obsolete.

[Sandra Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a fundamental unity in social sciences and arts- moments of synthesis, similar overarching themes. it'd be fallacious to try and distill the art from science or vice versa. Nisbet presents an array of intellectual and artistic minds from 19th century to prove his point and show linkages b/w the disciplines, women are curiously absent in his discussion throughout