File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2002/bourdieu.0205, message 35


Date: Sun, 19 May 2002 16:43:20 -0700
From: Patrick Crosby <pcrosby-AT-ieee.org>
Subject: Re: NY Times article on Riesman


Extremely interesting link. In it, Patterson not only gives a nice capsule
summary of Reisman's career, but points to some very troubling voids in
the American cultural scene, and some even more troubling ways in which
these voids, created by the abandonment of academic social thinkers, are
being fulfilled by the likes of Limbaugh, Schlessinger (a.k.a. Dr Laura),
Oprah, and the rest. Among "the rest," as I have here categorically lumped
them, is one of a particularly troubling figure who I have been exploring
lately: novelist and self proclaimed "philosopher" Ayn Rand (whose first
name correctly pronounced, if anyone cares, rhymes with "lion"). In
keeping with the title of her most popular novel, I am finding Rand to be
a largely unacknowledged fountainhead of the direction the thinking of the
masses has taken in the last three decades.
    Perhaps what we have here, in effect, is "the Spirit of Capitalism"
rearing it's ugly head in a most unexpected way: the "market" abandoned by
academic social thinkers is now being filled by third-rate novelists,
charismatic TV personalities, and Ph.D. physiologists masquerading as
licensed clinical psychologists.
    This set of circumstances ought to be particularly troubling to
today's academic social thinkers. I have heard several accounts of the
parents of undergraduate students with technical and biological majors
asking their sons' and daughters' sociology professors questions like,
"what are you wasting my son's time with stuff like this for?" The trend
Patterson describes makes questions such as this all the more difficult to
answer.

George Free wrote:

> There's an article in the Op-Ed page of the New York Times on the late
> David Riesman that may be of interest to members of this list
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/19/opinion/19PATT.html
>
> free registration required.
>
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