In social thought, the decade of the 1920's can be regarded in two contrasting fashions. On the one hand, it was an era of consolidation, in which an earlier revolution in ways of looking at society began to find wide acceptance and to extend into new areas of knowledge. On the other hand, it was marked by a philosophical revolution of its own, which drastically altered the earlier vocabulary of intellectual exchange, creating a cleavage between English and Continental thinking that was never satisfactorily bridged.
At the end of the First World War, a generation of unusually original social thinkers was passing from the scene or turning its intellectual activity in new directions. In Austria, the most influential figure of the whole half-century-Sigmund Freud--had virtually completed the outlines of his psychoanalytic theory. In Italy, Benedetto Croce had attained a position of unquestioned philosophical leadership: the volumes of his Philosophy of the Spirit in which Croce defined the criteria of aesthetics and historical study were achieving the position of classic formulations that they retained for the whole interwar period. In Germany and France, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim had put the study of sociology on a more empirical and objective basis, by deriving from specific and manageable problems the principles for the scientific study of society that the nineteenth-century fathers of sociology had tried in vain to formulate at one blow.
Durkheim died during the war; Weber, a year and a half after its close. Freud and Croce lived on for another generation, broadening the scope of their thinking and directing it into novel and unsuspected channels. But the effect on younger contemporaries was the same: alive or dead, the "old masters" continued to dominate the field, and the study of human society remained fixed in the paths that these had marked out for it in the prewar years.
No comments:
Post a Comment