Interesting article about one of the last of the mid-century public intellectuals, Nathan Glazer.  Thinkers like Glazer combined an awareness of what direct attention to social data can tell us, but also one of the last generation influenced by high social theory. Weber enabled people to care about data and also care about theory. Sociologists who have come after, from Talcott Parsons forward, have made the cost of entry into social thinking so high that one has to choose to be an empiricist or a theorist. The empiricists know data but are theoretically weak. The theorists make claims but can’t find the door knob to look out of the house of theory and look.

Here’s another piece on one of the mid-century public intellectuals, Daniel Bell.  This one is a son’s reminiscences of his father, or rather a son’s reminiscences of trying, and failing, to get his father to write down his own reminiscences. Because of that the actual content delivered by the piece is rather slighter than one might have hoped. I suppose we should not expect children to be exquisite analysts of their parents’ personaes. It asks too much of someone to love another, in the inevitably complicated way that real love must at best take, and still step back from their affections and analyze the object of those affections dispassionately.