Metaphor and History: The Western Idea of Social Development

by Robert A. Nisbet

The primary purpose of Metaphor and History is to explain the sources and contexts of the Western idea of social development. Nisbet explores the concept of social change across the whole range of Western culture, from ancient Greece to the present day. He does not see the idea of social development as a nineteenth century phenomenon or a by-product of the idea of biological evolution.Instead, Nisbet finds the metaphor of organic growth and the analogy of the life cycle--among the oldest in the history of human thought--embedded in the pronouncements of sages, historians, and social scientists from Heraclitus and Aristotle to Comte, Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, Berdyaev, and Sorokin. He relates the classic Greek metaphor of growth, applied to society; the Christian epic, with its substance in the fusion of Hebrew and Greek ideas; and ideas of progress, natural history, evolution, and sociological functionalism.This book may be considered the "biography of a metaphor" of social development, one that has persisted through two and a half millennia of Western European history. A sociologist's view of history, this is a work at once of synthesis and of exploration of the premises and foundations of social evolution and social change.

356 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

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