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Edward Shils's The Torment of Secrecy is one of the few minor classics to emerge from the cold war years of anticommunism and McCarthyism in the United States. Mr. Shils's "torment" is not only that of the individual caught up in loyalty and security procedures; it is also the torment of the accuser and judge. This essay in sociological analysis and political philosophy considers the cold war preoccupation with espionage, sabotage, and subversion at home, assessing the magnitude of such threats and contrasting it to the agitation - by lawmakers, investigators, and administrators - so wildly directed against the "enemy". Mr. Shils, widely regarded as one of the world's most influential social thinkers, has written an examination of a recurring American characteristic that is as timely as ever.
Edward Shils's The Torment of Secrecy is one of the few minor classics to emerge from the cold war years of anticommunism and McCarthyism in the United States. Mr. Shils's "torment" is not only that of the individual caught up in loyalty and security procedures; it is also the torment of the accuser and judge. This essay in sociological analysis and political philosophy considers the cold war preoccupation with espionage, sabotage, and subversion at home, assessing the magnitude of such threats and contrasting it to the agitation—by lawmakers, investigators, and administrators—so wildly directed against the "enemy." Mr. Shils's examination of a recurring American characteristic is as timely as ever. "Brief...lucid... brilliant."—American Political Science Review. "A fine, sophisticated analysis of American social metabolism."—New Republic. "An excitingly lucid and intelligent work on a subject of staggering importance...the social preconditions of political democracy."—Social Forces.
Divided into six sections, this title examines Government secrecy (GS) in a variety of contexts, including comparative examination of government control of information, new definitions, categories, censorship, ethics, and secrecy's relationship with freedom of information and transparency.
Edward Shils was one of the giants of sociological theory in the period after World War II. In this autobiography, written three years before his death in 1995 and never before published, Shils reflects on the remarkable range of his life's work and activities, including founding and editing the journal Minerva, being a central figure in the Congress of Cultural Freedom, serving as a founding member of the editorial board of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and being a member of the International Council on the Future of the University. Shils recognizes that a unity of concern runs through his many theoretical writings and activities. Early in his life the concern was expressed as understanding the character of consensus. During the last fifteen years of his life, he refined his understanding of consensus through investigation of the nature of "collective self-consciousness." That concern was the structure and character of the moral order of a society, and, in particular, liberal, democratic society. Accompanying the autobiography are two unpublished essays, "Society, Collective Self-Consciousness and Collective Self-Consciousnesses" and "Collective Self-Consciousness and Rational Choice," two areas of intellectual concern discussed in the autobiography. The book contains fascinating discussion of many of the people Shils knew throughout his illustrious career: Robert Park, Louis Wirth, Talcott Parsons, Karl Mannheim, Michael Polanyi, Audrey Richards, Karl Popper, Robert Merton, and many others. The volume represents Shils' final formulations on the character of society and its moral order. As such, it is a most important contribution both to the history of the social sciences in the twentieth century and to sociological theory.
Traces the development of secrecy as a government policy over the twentieth century and its adverse effects on Cold War policy making
Few studies focus on the modes of knowledge transmission (or concealment), or the trends of continuity or change from the Ancient to the Late Antique worlds. In Antiquity, knowledge was cherished as a scarce good, cultivated through the close teacher-student relationship and often preserved in the closed circle of the initated. From Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform texts to a Shi'ite Islamic tradition, this volume explores how and why knowledge was shared or concealed by diverse communities in a range of Ancient and Late Antique cultural contexts. From caves by the Dead Sea to Alexandria, both normative and heterodox approaches to knowledge in Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities are explored. Biblical and qur'anic passages, as well as gnostic, rabbinic and esoteric Islamic approaches are discussed. In this volume, a range of scholars from Assyrian studies to Jewish, Christian and Islamic studies examine diverse approaches to, and modes of, knowledge transmission and concealment, shedding new light on both the interconnectedness, as well as the unique aspects, of the monotheistic faiths, and their relationship to the ancient civilisations of the Fertile Crescent.
Preliminary Material /Kees W. Bolle -- Secrecy in Religion /Kees W. Bolle -- The Notion of Secrecy in Lugbara Religious Thought /John Middleton -- Secrecy in India's Religions /G. R. Welbon -- No News is Good News: the Gospel as Enigma /Jonathan Z. Smith -- Secrecy in Sufism /Annemarie Schimmel -- Secrecy in Modern Science /David K. Himrod -- Index /Kees W. Bolle.
In State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary, William Walters calls for secrecy to be given a more central place in critical security studies and elevated to become a core concept when theorising power in liberal democracies. Through investigations into such themes as the mobility of cryptographic secrets, the power of public inquiries, the connection between secrecy and place-making, and the aesthetics of secrecy within immigration enforcement, Walters challenges commonplace understandings of the covert and develops new concepts, methods and themes for secrecy and security research. Walters identifies the covert imaginary as both a limit on our ability to think politics differently and a ground to develop a richer understanding of power. State Secrecy and Security offers readers a set of thinking tools to better understand the strange powers that hiding, revealing, lying, confessing, professing ignorance and many other operations of secrecy put in motion. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of security, secrecy and politics more broadly.
This is the highly controversial & much-publicized report that proposed changes for improving classification & declassification practices of the U.S. Government to protect the nation's secrets while still ensuring that the public has access to information on government operations. Explores the historical roots of current practices, the consequences for both the dissemination of information to the public & the sharing of info. within the Federal Government, the functioning of the bureaucracy that protects government secrets, the effort to promote greater accountability, & the various costs associated with protecting secrets & reducing secrecy. Charts & tables.
The powers of political secrecy and social spectacle have been taken to surreal extremes recently. Witness the twin terrors of a president who refuses to disclose dealings with foreign powers while the private data of ordinary citizens is stolen and marketed in order to manipulate consumer preferences and voting outcomes. We have become accustomed to thinking about secrecy in political terms and personal privacy terms. In this bracing, new work, Hugh Urban wants us to focus these same powers of observation on the role of secrecy in religion. With Secrecy, Urban investigates several revealing instances of the power of secrecy in religion, including nineteenth-century Scottish Rite Freemasonry, the sexual magic of a Russian-born Parisian mystic; the white supremacist BrüderSchweigen or “Silent Brotherhood” movement of the 1980s, the Five Percenters, and the Church of Scientology. An electrifying read, Secrecy is the culmination of decades of Urban’s reflections on a vexed, ever-present subject.