A Teacher Can Be Known by His Course Reading List

Perhaps one of the best ways to understand Arthur Vidich is to  read the books that were part of his course reading lists toward the end of his life.  The graduate level course "Democracy in Mass Society: The United States" was offered in the fall of 1996 and gives an excellent perspective on the ideas and analytical approaches Vidich applied to American political processes: Here is the complete reading list for that course.

Democracy in Mass Society: The United States

Department of Sociology                                            Professor Arthur J. Vidich

The Graduate Faculty                                                 Fall 1996

New School for Social Research                                 4:00-5:40

GS-194

The course consists of fourteen lecture and discussion sessions organized under seven topic rubrics listed below. The rubrics are designed to highlight the political processes, rhetorics and mechanics of the American democracy during this presidential election year. Under each session’s topic heading there is one required reading and a list of supplemental titles. Required readings and selected supplemental readings will be distributed to the members of the course.

Course Requirements: Each student in consultation with the instructor will submit a research paper written on a subject chosen from one or another of the topic rubrics. The list of supplementary titles are provided as preliminary bibliographic references for the research paper.

Course Outline and Reading List

I. The Conflation of Religion and Politics in the American Democracy.

Required:

Michael W. Hughey: “The Political Covenant: Protestant Foundations of the American State,” State, Culture and Society, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1985).

Supplementary:

Adam Seligman: “Inner Worldly Individualism and the Institutionalization of Puritanism in late seventeenth-century New England,” British Journal of sociology, Vol. 41, No.4. (December 1991).

Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

J. Fenimore Cooper: The American Democrat (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981, pp. 12-35.

Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953 reprint, Boston, 1961)

Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, 1978, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI

II. Characteristics of Mass Society

Required:

Herbert Blumer: The Concept of Mass Society”, in Stanford M. Lyman and Arthur J. Vidich, Social Order and the Public Philosophy: An Analysis and Interpretation of the Work of Herbert Blumer (Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1988), pp. 337-352 (see also pp. 35-54).

Supplementary:

Emil Lederer: Masses and Social Groups and “The Background of Fascism,” in State of the Masses, the Threat of the Classless Society (New York, W.W. Norton, 1940), pp. 23-68.

C. Wright Mills, “The Mass Society” in The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 298-324.

Edward Shils, “The Theory of Mass Society”, in Fred Krinsky (ed.) Democracy and Complexity: who governs the governors? (Beverly Hills, Glencoe Press, 1968), pp. 3-23

III. Masses, Classes, Races and Ethnicities

Required:

Michael W. Hughey, “Protestantism and the Politics of Diversity: Religion, Race and Ethnicity in the Ame3ircan Covenant” (manuscript).

Supplementary:

Arthur J. Vidich, “Religion, Economics and Class in American Politics”, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall 1978, pp. 4-22.

Michael W. Hughey and Arthur J. Vidich, “The New American Pluralism: Racial and Ethnic Sodalities and their Sociological Implications,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 6, No. 2, Winter 1992, pp. 159-180.

Michael W. Hughey, “Americanism and its Discontents, Protestantism, Nativism and Political Heresy in America,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1992, pp. 533- 554.

Hans Speier, “Democracy and the Social Insecurity Level” in Social Order and the Risk of War, (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1952), pp. 27-35

Joseph Bensman and Arthur J. Vidich, Economic Class & Personality: in American Society: The Welfare State and Beyond, (South Hadley, MA, Bergin & Garvey, 1985, Chapter IV, pp. 63-86.

IV. Democracy and the Professionalization of Political Leadership

Required:

Joseph Bensman, “The Crisis of Confidence in Modern Politics”, in International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 1988, pp. 15-35.

Supplementary:

Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”, in Essays in Sociology, ed. By Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, (New York, Oxford University Press 1946, pp 77-128.

Joseph Bensman and Robert Lillienfeld, “Political Attitudes” in Craft & Consciousness: Occupational Technique and the Development of World Images, (New York, Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), pp. 303-324

Jeffrey K Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

V. Nineteenth Century Values: Twentieth Century Politics

Required:

Arthur J. Vidich, “American Democracy in the late Twentieth Century”, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 4, No. 1,  1990, pp. 5-30.

Supplementary:

Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Why Americans Don’t Vote (New York: Pantheon, 1989)

Kathleen Hall Jamieson and David S. Birdsell, Presidential Debates: The Challenge of Creating and Informed Electorate, (New York, Oxford University Press, 1988).

Arthur J. Vidich, “Political Legitimacy in Bureaucratic Society: An Analysis of Watergate”, Social research, Vol. 42, No. 4. (1975), pp. 778-811.

James Division Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, Making Sense of the Battles over the Family, Art, Education, Law and Politics, 1995, Basic Books, New York, NY

  

VI. The Rules and Mechanics of Electoral Democracy

Required:

Andrew Arato, “Constitutions and the Continuity in the Transitions”, Constellations, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1994, pp. 92-112

Andrew Arato, “Electoral Rules, Democracy and the Coherence of Constitutions. Theoretical Considerations and the Case of the New Democracies”.  New School, May 1995

Supplementary:

Benjamin Ginsburg and Alan Stone (Eds). Do Elections Matter, 1996, M.E. Sharpe

Herbert E. Alexander and Anthony Corrado, Financing the 1992 Election, 1995, M.E. Sharpe

Joseph Bensman and Arthur J. Vidich, The Coordination of Organizations”, in American Society: The Welfare State and Beyond, (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1985), Chapter 5, pp. 87-100

John Lukacs, “Inheritances and Prospects: The Passage from a Democratic Order to a Bureaucratic State”, in Outgrowing Democracy, (New York: Doubleday, 1984), pp. 368-404

Eugene Lewis, American Politics in a Bureaucratic Age: Citizens, Constituents, Clients and Victims (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1977).

Robert Westbrook, “Politics as Consumption: Managing the Modern American Election”, in Richard Wrightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (eds.), The Culture of Consumption, (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 143-173.

Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: Chicago University Press), 1988.

VII. The Roles of public Opinion, Propaganda and the Media

Required:

Paul Cantrell, “Opinion Polling and American Democratic Culture”, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 5, No.2, Winter 1991

Supplementary:

Guy Oakes and Andrew Grossman, “Managing Nuclear Terror: The Genesis of American Civil Defense Strategy”, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 5, No.3, Spring 1991

Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and the American Cold War Culture, New York, Oxford University Press, 1994 (on reserve in the library).

Arthur J. Vidich, “Atomic Bombs and American Democracy”, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 8, No.3, 1995 (a comment on Oakes’ book)

Robert Jackall, Propaganda, New York, NYU Press, 1995.

Joseph C. Spear, Presidents and the Press: The Nixon Legacy, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Packaging the Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).