The significance of Shils

Edward Shils was a widely recognized but misunderstood thinker The original contexts of his thought are not well understood and greatly distorted by a ssociating him with the concerns of Parsons. Shils provides a fully compara ble alternative to the thought of Habermas and Foucault, with essentially s imilar roots: practice theory, the dissolution of Marxism in the twenties, and Carl Schmitt. Though Shils was indebted to the American sociological tr adition with respect to these issues his sources were outside it: in Hendri k de Man, T. S. Eliot, and Michael Polanyi. It is shown how Shils responded to Schmitt's argument about the inherent conflict between democracy and li beralism in terms of an account of civility and tradition, and how this arg ument results in a critique of Foucault, Habermas, and collectivistic liber alism.