The Sociological Tradition Quotes

“The paradox of sociology-and it is, as I argue in these pages, a creative paradox-lies in the fact that although it falls, in its objectives and in the political and scientific values of its principal figures, in the
mainstream of modernism, its essential concepts and its implicit perspectives place it much closer, generally speaking, to philosophical conservatism.

Community, authority, tradition, the sacred: these are primary conservative preoccupations in the age, to be seen vividly in the intellectual line that reaches from Bonald and Haller to Burckhardt and Taine. So are presentiments of alienation, of totalitarian power rising from mass democracy, and of cultural decay. One will look in vain for significant impact of these ideas and presentiments on the serious interests of economists, political scientists, psychologists, and ethnologists in the age. But in sociology they are---transfigured, of course, by rationalist or scientific objectives of the sociologists-at the very core of the discipline.”
― Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition

“From Fustel de Coulanges to his student, Durkheim, is but a short step. Durkheim's distinction between the sacred and the profane, and his linking of the sacred to the social are but a broadening and systematization of what Fustel had confined to the classical city-state.”
― Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition

“It is surely plain today that the most fundamental ideological conflicts of the past century and a half have been between, on the one hand, values of community, moral authority, hierarchy, and the sacred and, on the other hand, individualism, equality, moral release, and rationalist techniques of organization and power.”
― Peretz Bernstein, The Sociological Tradition