Edward Shils Libri

Explores the history, significance, and future of tradition as a whole. This book reveals the importance of tradition to social and political institutions, technology, science, literature, religion, and scholarship.

One of the few minor classics to emerge from the cold war years of McCarthyism --an essay in sociological analysis and political philosophy that considers the cold war preoccupation with espionage, sabotage, and subversion at home, and the agitation so wildly directed against the enemy. Brief...lucid...brilliant.--American Political Science Review. With an Introduction by Daniel P. Moynihan.

This reprint features a translation from 1949 by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, offering a historical perspective on the original work. It includes a fresh introduction by Robert J. Antonio and Alan Sica, providing contemporary insights and context for readers.

Edward Shils was one of the leading intellectual defenders of freedom in the twentieth century. In these nine essays, he explores the importance of civility and tradition to a free society. The essays’ significance is enormous, for Shils was one of the first and assuredly one of the most courageous writers to examine the nature of civility and civil society and their relation to a free, ordered, liberal democratic society. Edward Shils (1910–1995) was Professor of Sociology and Social Thought at the University of Chicago and Honorary Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Steven Grosby is an Associate Professor at Clemson University.

The word «capital» derives from the latin «capitalis», which stands for head, or mind, suggesting that real wealth has been seen as residing in knowledge and ideas. Today the so-called information revolution makes us aware that an increasing share of our wealth, our capital, is in knowledge, in software rather than in hardware. Financial markets are linked into networks that transmit data instantaneously, and ideas transgress national borders. In such an environment those institutions that are concerned with improving the nation's human capital will be of paramount importance.