TY  - CHAP
AB  - Abstract This paper seeks to identify in Philip Selznick’s earliest predominantly organizational writings the germs of a strong and unifying temper – or better perhaps, because the concept plays a significant role in the works, a coherent intellectual and moral character. It infuses Selznick’s work in all the domains he entered. It was evident in his earliest political writings and contributions to organization theory, and remained so in his later contributions to the sociology of law and social and public philosophy.At one level each of his works had a different subject, at another they all were pondered within a common frame of concerns, intellectual and moral, and approached with a distinctive manner and tone. At a general level, this involved a conception of social science as a “humanist science,” the central concern of which was the fate of values in the world. His specific posture in relation to this subject was underpinned by a commitment to moral realism, or what I call “Hobbesian idealism.”Selznick began, like Thomas Hobbes as a threat expert, and never lost regard for that expertise. He is alert to fragility, vulnerability, and the need to guard against them. Moreover, his normative reflections are sustained and deepened by his understanding of social processes in general, and of the dangers to which organizations and institutions, but also human personalities and groups, are susceptible. He has a lot to tell us about ways in which those dangers might be avoided. However, Selznick resists stopping where Hobbes stops. Though he stresses the presence and resilience of evil and the need for strenuous efforts to contain it, he holds out for more. Indeed, though recognizing danger might be the beginning of wisdom, it is only half – over time less than half – of the story.He emphasized the importance of attending both to Hobbesian insights and idealistic ambitions in relation to organizational leadership, to law, to justice, to human achievement of all kinds. To see him, as the earliest critics of his organizational theory did, as a voice of unadulterated melancholy, or as his later ones tended to, as altogether too programmatically sunny and full of hope, is to miss the real core of the intellectual and moral sensibility that pervaded his life of scholarship in the social sciences. The paper concludes by commending this uncommon sensibility, both at the general level of advocacy of “humanist science” and in its specific “Hobbesian idealist” posture.
VL  - 44
SN  - 978-1-78441-726-0, 978-1-78441-725-3/0733-558X
DO  - 10.1108/S0733-558X20150000044003
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20150000044003
AU  - Krygier Martin
PY  - 2015
Y1  - 2015/01/01
TI  - Selznick’s Hobbesian Idealism: Its Nature and Its Origins
T2  - Institutions and Ideals: Philip Selznick’s Legacy for Organizational Studies
T3  - Research in the Sociology of Organizations
PB  - Emerald Group Publishing Limited
SP  - 21
EP  - 52
Y2  - 2024/04/26
ER  -