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Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life
Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, ...

University of California Press, 2007 - 410 pages

average customer review:based on 14 reviews
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The best mirror of the American psyche

It is not easy, nor obvious, to understand what makes "the American mind" tick! HOTH gives us a skeleton on which we can hang our observations. Guess what, it is a great framework. 5-Stars all the way in spite of the fact this wasn't *pleasure* reading. A must read!


Interviews with Americans tell the truth about Individualism

This book is about the inevitable conflict between American Individualism and the fact that humans are by nature social. We hunger for relationship yet we want it only on our terms. Bellah and his team of reseachers take on the enormous task of interviewing people from all over the country and the results of these interviews are presented factually and then analyzed. Whether one agrees with the book's conclusions or not, the interviewees speak for themselves, and they speak for a majority of Americans today who are often torn by conflicting authoritative messages and motives from without and within. This book is a marvelous and sometimes unsettling mirror into contemporary American society.


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Current American Character - Individualism

Habits of the Heart describes and analyzes the current American Character both in great breadth and with great depth. It gave me a lot to think about. And it gave me a framework to use for my thinking. Bits and pieces of information, some of which I'd noticed before but discounted, are fit into both a historical and a current context.

The book is not a call to arms, nor does it present a list of suggestions for how to behave. The authors' direct opinions are circumscribed to the few pages of the Conclusion and the Appendix. And many of those comments have to do with either how academic sociology should do research or how the book was written. How five authors jointly wrote a single book sounds like an interesting story, but isn't commented on any further than to say it happened and it was a good thing.

As analysis it really does rank right up there with Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America and David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd. As political tract it isn't in the race.


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A social scientific nightmare

This book is an interesting read but is so sloppy in its scientific approach that it makes the serious student of social science want to cry. Though Bellah argues that social science must be like public philosphy, the reader still wonders whether he takes this stuff seriously or not. A more disciplined approach would have been warranted for such sweeping conclusions.END


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