Sublime

Its scholars study many different kinds of cultural groups—from hunter-gatherer clans to corporations to nations—investigating cognitive structures, social structures, biases, and behaviors.

Social institutions, networks and groups construct, mould and orchestrate human actions. Marx famously argued that people make their own history, but they do so not under circumstances of their own choosing since the ‘tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living’

becoming a matutinal rite as inevitable as coffee and orange juice. When the New York World—famous for its liberalism and the wit of its columnists—had ceased publication in February, 1931, Lippmann, its editor, had gone over to the Herald Tribune and to sudden national fame. Clear, cool, and orderly in his thinking, he seemed to be able to reduce

studying the motivations of individuals in isolation: the patterns we see are a fundamentally social affair. More, as Anderson

This reaction is understandable, as it based on two defining characteristics of today’s social decay that the peace researcher Johan Galtung calls anomie, the loss of norms and values, and atomie, the breakdown of social structures.

To make our institutions perform responsibly, autonomously, and on a high level of achievement is thus the only safeguard of freedom and dignity in the pluralist society of institutions. Performing, responsible management is the alternative to tyranny and our only protection against it.

His work is exemplary—indeed, monumental—but scarcely anyone believes today that Freud was doing science, any more than educated people believe that Marx was doing science, or Max Weber or Lewis Mumford or Bruno Bettelheim or Carl Jung or Margaret Mead or Arnold Toynbee. What these people were doing—and Stanley Milgram was doing—is documenting the