Susan Jacoby

A Nation of Uncommitted, Distracted Dilettantes

by Jonathan Liu
Feb. 12th, 2008, 1:50 pm
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William Jennings Bryan, ‘The Great Commoner,’ argues for the prosecution during the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial.’
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William Jennings Bryan, ‘The Great Commoner,’ argues for the prosecution during the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial.’

THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON
By Susan Jacoby
Pantheon, 356 pages, $26

A few hundred pages into The Division of Labor in Society, a 1893 tract notable for its eyeball-bleeding tedium and the insouciant unfalsifiability of its categorizations, Emile Durkheim finally addresses a matter the modern reader might care to hear about: namely, “the division of intellectual labor.”

“Science,” Durkheim writes, “carved up into a host of detailed studies that have no link with one another, no longer forms a solid whole. … The division of labor cannot therefore be pushed too far without being a source of disintegration.” Durkheim, of course, spent the rest of his life establishing sociology as its own special, separate science.  read more »