Sample introductions from contrasting essay genres
The Metropolis and Mental Life
THE DEEPEST PROBLEMS ofmodern life derive from the claim of the individual to preservethe autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face ofoverwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of externalculture, and of the technique of life. The fight with naturewhich primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attainsin this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenthcentury called upon man to free himself of all the historicalbonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics.Man's nature, originally good and common to all, should developunhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenthcentury demanded the functional specialization of man and hiswork; this specialization makes one individual incomparableto another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possibleextent. However, this specialization makes each man themore directly dependent upon the supplementary activities ofall others. Nietzsche sees the full development of the individualconditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialismbelieves in the suppression of all competition for the samereason. Be that as it may, in all these positions the same basicmotive is at work: the person resists to being leveled down andworn out by a social-technological mechanism. An inquiry intothe inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products,into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solvethe equation which structures like the metropolis set up betweenthe individual and the super-individual contents of life.Such an inquiry must answer the question of how the personalityaccommodates itself in the adjustments to external forces. Thiswill be my task today.
The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individ-
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From—Simmel, G. (1950) ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ in Wolff, K.H. ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, pp. 409-424.
RECONCEPTUALIZING RELIGION, MAGIC, AND SCIENCE
Three of the most central concepts used in the social scientific study of religion are so poorly and inconsistently defined as to preclude coherent discussion, let alone theoretical progress. In this essay I examine the similarities and crucial differences that can be used to clearly distinguish religion, magic, and science. Among the many contrasts I pursue, science is restricted to the empirical world, while religion is more effective when it limits its concern to the nonempirical, hence there is no necessary incompatibility between the two. Although magic and religion are both based on supernatural assumptions, magic concerns the empirical world and thus is vulnerable to scientific falsification. Futhermore, in contrast with religion, the supernatural assumptions of magic are crude and impersonal. Thus, in contrast with both science and magic, only religion can adequately address issues of ultimate meaning and morality.
It is often said that social scientists don't know what they're talking about. And too often it's true, at least to the extent that they are using terms they have not bothered to define or seem unaware that a given disagreement is definitional, not substantive. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in discussions of religion, but the problem is nearly as severe vis-a-vis the concepts of magic, and science. There are, of course, no "true" definitions of these terms hovering in hyperspace and awaiting discovery -- all def- initions are intellectual conventions. But, it is entirely feasible to formulate mutually exclusive and theoretically efficient definitions of each, while retaining substantial lin- guistic continuity.
AMBIGUITIES IN CURRENT USAGE
For thousands of years the term "religion" usually meant the worship of supernatural beings. Even a century ago, social scientists thought this definition was adequate-- Edward Burnett Tylor, the founder of British anthropology, being content to define reli- gion as "belief in spiritual beings" ([1871] 1958, 2:8). Then came Emile Durkheim, and all such clarity was lost.
Durkheim not only denied that supernatural beings were essential to religion, but regarded them as "no more than a minor accident," and admonished that the wise "soci- ologist will pay scant attention to the different ways in which" people conceive of the divine, and "will see in religion only a social discipline" ([1886] 1994:19,21). Hence, Durkheim defined religion as "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred
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From—Stark, R. (2001) “Reconceptualizing Religion, Magic, and Science”, Review of Religious Research 43(2): pp. 101-120.