For a good while, men of high intelligence have been extolling a strictly descriptive phenomenological theory of art, concerned with the work of art itself and with its effect upon the spectator or the audience. Moreover, theories exist which tend in this direction, but sometimes they are still contaminated with the methods of psychological aesthetics, and sometimes they devote too much effort to combating those methods and to defining their own theory rather than putting it to the test of application.

The work of art is an object that exists solely for the human understanding, but which exists for it objectively—that is to say, outside or beyond individual variations of perception. Anyone who wishes to achieve results in this field—provisional results, to be sure, but at least concrete and capable of being verified or corrected—must describe both the common denominators and the distinctive traits of such objects.

Socio-psychological delegation of feeling and fictive identification play a role in the life of society, a role which indicates that they are a constitutive structural element of any healthy social organism. To be sure, in this case we are concerned with a special form of delegation or identification which is characterized by its positive, serious, and purposeful tone. This particular form presupposes a firm, lasting relationship between the partners of the interrelation, has as an objective the attainment of very definite purposes, and is based upon a more or less intensive cooperation of the “delegating” component. This conviction was expressed recently among others by Roger Caillois in regard to games, and its importance was especially emphasized.

What is shamanism? What is the social nature of this institution which at times seems so clearly to be situated on the fringe of society that one is tempted to call it anti-social? There is indeed no lack of definitions, but where religion is concerned definitions are never satisfactory, for the limits of various phenomena are too uncertain and shadings between them too subtle. The social position of the shaman is so variable that it seems hardly possible even to state the question precisely. On the other hand, we find in mythology and ritual numerous elements indicating the place held by the shaman in collective, and especially in more general, representations of divinities. An attempt to establish, as evidenced in mythology, the position of the shaman in relation to the divinities will lead us to indications as to his social nature, that is, to society's conception of the shaman.

The term Christendom (Christianitas) meaning a territorial area took many centuries to establish itself, but by the twelfth century it had become part of the regular vocabulary of the Latin-speaking and -writing world. During the long period of the emergence of Christendom the world Europe was not a competitor, for it was used only in a geographical sense in scientific works and in exegesis on those passages of the Bible which described the peopling of the world. There is, however, a marked change in the fourteenth century in this regard. Europe is a rare word in Dante: in Petrarch it is frequently found. It is true that there is one isolated example of the adjective in the eighth century, in a chronicle describing the united resistance to the Moors. Thereafter there is, I believe, no further example until the fourteenth century. Dante in fact, who has no inhibitions about using the words “Asian” and “African,” deliberately avoids “European.” The next generation sees Boccaccio use the word “Europaic”—an old invention, which was not to have any parallels either in Latin or in vernaculars. And it is not till we come to Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini that we find Europaeus emerging. The adjective is found more than once in his voluminous writings. In the following generation we find Erasmus using Europaeus and in the next generation again we find the word entering the vernacular languages of Europe. It is, of course, true that Christianitas (or more commonly respublica Christiana) continues to be used with great frequency during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, together with the vernacular equivalents of these expressions.

Unlike any other type of culture, popular culture—a full-fledged style of living with a distinct pattern of feeling, thinking, believing, and acting— was made possible and in the end necessary by mass production. Unless the requirements and effects of industrialization are fully grasped, popular culture does not become intelligible.

In the last two centuries, machinery and specialization have immensely increased economic productivity—the amount of goods produced per manhour—in Europe and America. This process has gone farthest in America, where popular culture too has gone farthest. Although enrichment led to a vast population increase, production per head rose stupendously and is still rising. Everybody benefited materially, but the main beneficiaries were the poor. Their income rose most. Furthermore, if the income gap between poor and rich had not narrowed as it did, an expanded national income distributed in unchanged proportions still would have augmented the welfare of the poor disproportionately. If the income of poor and rich alike increases by 50 per cent, the welfare of the poor is raised far more than that of the rich. Our progressive tax system—which taxes additions to the income of the poor less than additions to the income of the rich—is based entirely on this roughly correct view.

The science of man has not, as yet, had its historian. This regrettable fact demonstrates that the human or cultural sciences have not attained their full growth. They rest upon a fragmentary and indecisive epistemology, the very idea of human reality being, in the minds of the specialists, still quite vague.

Nevertheless, this latecomer among the positive disciplines has had, throughout the ages, its prophets and its precursors; but their affirmation, isolated in the cultural context of the period, merely provide a steppingstone for the future. Several centuries ahead of his time, Ibn Khaldoun, in his Prolégomènes, defined the sociological and human reality of Arab civilization. With the appearance of Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and Jean Bodin, the Renaissance witnessed the first attempts to formulate a concrete anthropology and sociology. But the ways and means of this knowledge of man by man existed solely at the level of intuition. Even Vico was to rely only upon his own genius in order to evolve the total phenomenon of human reality in its becoming. A goodly number of the great historians of the nineteenth century, in Germany, in England, and in Spain, were to engage in a kind of doctrineless anthropology, entirely intuitive, extensions of which are encountered today in the works of an Ortega y Gasset, a Spengler or a Toynbee.

Planning is widely presumed to be alien to the moral assumptions of American democracy. Where tolerated it has come to be identified largely with the process of economizing, with what is so often the American approach to life: getting the most for your money. Thus the city planner, whose primary concern is with the practical problems of zoning, the routing of a new cross-town parkway, or the provision of parking space, is also a respected member of his community. Does he not help, after all, to conserve community values? His technical skills stand in the service of property and of the dominant class interests which control it. The planner in large industry or in the military finds himself much in the same position: goals are defined for him in advance; he is to work for the most rational solution. His status, therefore, is that of a high-class technician; and only in this role is he fully accepted by his culture.