Ever since Durkheim it has been a commonplace of family sociology that marriage serves as a protection against anomie for the individual. Interesting and pragmatically useful though this insight is, it is but the negative side of a phenomenon of much broader significance. If one speaks of anomic states, then one ought properly to investigate also the nomic processes that, by their absence, lead to the aforementioned states. If, consequently, one finds a negative correlation between marriage and anomie, then one should be led to inquire into the character of marriage as a nomos-building instrumentality, that is, of marriage as a social arrangement that creates for the individual the sort of order in which he can experience his life as making sense. It is our intention here to discuss marriage in these terms. While this could evidently be done in a macrosociological perspective, dealing with marriage as a major social institution related to other broad structures of society, our focus will be microsociological, dealing primarily with the social processes affecting the individuals in any specific marriage, although, of course, the larger framework of these processes will have to be understood. In what sense this discussion can be described as microsociology of knowledge will hopefully become clearer in the course of it.

In his Trattato di Pittura, written in 1435, Leon Battista Alberti recalls Zeuxis, who, judging his own paintings invaluable, refused to put a price on them. The nobility of art and the artist's interests are thus defended in a work which expressed above all the tendencies of a new generation. But it was also the first manifesto in a propaganda campaign whose fruits were to be fully realized a century later. The artist would finally come to be respected, paid for his pains on an equal basis with the man of letters (until he surpassed the latter), be renowned and assured of meriting his fame. Michelangelo rejoiced in the hardness of marble and bronze because these materials would assure the survival of his works over a long period. When Vasari sent him a copy of his Vite, he thanked him with a sonnet, in which he congratulates Vasari for his work on behalf of artists —and not only contemporary artists, since he also refers to those who, having lived in less fortunate times, had fallen into, or risked falling into, oblivion: Or le memorie altrui già spente, accese…

Degradation has been associated with earning a livelihood in the arts since at least Plato, who showed disdain for the sophists who taught rhetorics for money. Aristotle with his concept energeia—which he designated as all activities that do not pursue an end but exhaust their full meanings in the performance itself—infused into western tradition the idea that only what we do for its own sake is noble. The lucre-versus-glory conflict pervades all writings on art from Leonardo and Vasari to the 19th century idea of the “pot au feu” and “making concessions” to the public. Only to paint for glory and immortality is noble, to submit to the whims of a patron is treason to art itself. These attitudes are rejected by many contemporary artists as anachronistic and sentimental snobbishness. Many artists, on the other hand, consider them viable. For them, living up to these ideals and subsisting at the same time is a dilemma. Patronage has virtually disappeared and the public purchases paintings from the well-established artists. Many resolve their dilemma by entering commercial or, as many prefer to call it, advertising art because there is a large and increasing demand for their skills. These circumstances, together with the historical sentiments referred to, led me to ask the following questions: What social-psychological conflicts do artists experience when they enter advertising art? What changes do they undergo in their identity as they mature as commercial or advertising artists? And what are the implications of working in advertising art for the artist, his art and for the mass society of which he and his work are a part? These questions formed the basis of an empirical study of 53 commercial artists who were living in Chicago. Part of that study is described in this paper.

The people of Iceland enriched the literature of the Middle Ages with a genre of epic prose that is found nowhere else in Europe. It takes the form of narratives depicting people and events belonging to a period of about one century, which begins in 930 and extends up to 1030. The Icelandic people had established themselves along the entire shore of the deserted island, and the settlers had divided among themselves the arable soil. During the first hundred years the population, composed of wealthy landowners who had left their native soil of Norway, bold adventurers and Vikings, tired of their unstable life of pillage, were looking for the stability that would be conducive to a permanent and ordered society. The settlers were rude, ambitious and avid for power; hence there were many instances of embittered and sometimes bloody clashes. This period abounds in personalities of great stature, fighting for their real or usurped claims. It can well be described as a heroic period, which gave men the opportunity to utilize all of their physical and mental faculties. Later on, in the thirteenth century, when the people of Iceland attempted to revive the memory of their ancestors from the earliest years of the country's history, their conception of them was magnified by the admiration of a generation of men who believed themselves to be the epigones of true heros.

In the minds of the leading Marxist theorists of before 1917, the triumph of the proletarian revolution, the socialisation of the means of production and the setting up of centralized planning would inevitably lead to a society organized in such a manner that, after a preliminary phase of democratic dictatorship of the proletariat, the social body would then cease to be divided according to classes and the exploitation of man by man would be abolished. This would subsequently lead to an integration of the major values inherited from middle-class humanism (universality, individual freedom, equality, the dignity of the human person, freedom of expression) so as to endow them, for the first time in the history of humanity, with a quality of authenticity instead of the purely formal status that they had previously been granted in a capitalist society.

Is the experience of the primitives fundamentally different from ours, or is there only a difference of degree? What is striking at first is that this experience presents two aspects. On the one hand, the primitives understand and think as we do; they distinguish objects and their relationships by localizing them in the space and time of the exterior world, by separating them from the subjective “I”, in short by objectifying them in a rational manner. This is the “natural” aspect of primitive experience.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is closely linked to the ethno-linguistic research of the American school of anthropology, which can take pride in its number of leading scholars, all more or less formed or influenced by F. Boas. The anthropological and linguistic interest in the life of the American Indians is understandable within the framework of the social problems posed by the existence of numerous and varied Indian communities in the United States. From this stem the first attempts to transcribe and understand the languages of the Indian tribes which by no means can be separated from later theoretical research. On this practical basis an especially active school of anthropology was founded and has developed. It collected the empiric materials on the basis of which the theoretical generalizations of what is now called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were built.