Abstract

This is at once a fascinating, illuminating, perceptive, and perplexing book. It has many virtues. There are probably few intellectuals in any "discipline" who can write about the sweep of Western civilization with such scope, insight, and perceptiveness. Nisbet has attempted to write a history of a metaphor which has exerted an enormous influence on Western thinking from the Greeks until our time. It is the metaphor of organic development as applied to the understanding of social development. According to Nisbet we find this basic metaphor at the root of Greek thinking about cycles, the Christian idea of epic, and the modern idea of development as progress. The first part subtly sketches the variations on the metaphor of organic growth in The Greeks, The Christians, and The Moderns. This in turn establishes a background for exploring the theory of social development articulated from the eighteenth century to the present. Although Nisbet is modest in his claims about his distinctive contribution to each of these historical chapters, he does bring fresh insight to bear and exposes numerous myths that have cluttered our historical understanding. Given the scope of his treatment, there is plenty that "specialists" may question, although even where one disagrees with his interpretations, one can't help admiring his command of the material. It is the final chapter that leaves one perplexed. For while Nisbet has made an excellent case for showing how deep the metaphor of organic development has been in Western thought, he seems to be genuinely ambivalent about its significance and pragmatic value. Operating in this chapter is a dichotomy between the "literal" and the "metaphoric" that is never fully explicated. Nisbet seems to think that with proper judiciousness, the metaphor can be revealing when applied to large scale units such as "civilization" and "culture," but that it is disastrous and dogmatic when used to account for specific instances of social behavior. The book ends with a rather sharp polemical attack on contemporary functionalists. It would seem that Nisbet set out to trace the variations of the metaphor of organic development in order to show how it still influences contemporary "sophisticated" thinking and to expose the abuses and irrelevance of the metaphor for understanding social behavior, but in the course of his masterful exploration he has succeeded in laying the groundwork for a serious questioning of his own polemical conclusions.--R. J. B.