The Many-Splendored Society is a multi-volume groundwork that explains how man's language creates social reality. The subtitle of this second volume, An Edifice of Symbols, points to a set of general categories and dimensions, all based on properties of language, for the study of social reality. We learn about norms and contracts, organizations, networks, mass media, folk life, and city life. Most important, we find out how symbols create the societal realms of science, economy, polity, art, religion, and morality. These realms have different goals and rationalities and exhibit different spontaneous orders. When they join so that no one overwhelms the others, we have a many-splendored society. An Edifice of Symbols ends with a summary in the form of a grand table of societal realms. A chemist might see this table as kindred to his field, for it has some properties of a Periodic System of the type discovered in chemistry in the nineteenth century. When you know the place of any phenomenon placed in this table of social reality, you learn a great deal of its characteristics. This is another of the author's achievements to give the general reader a Chock Full o'Nuts with exciting discoveries in social science, and to give professionals a systematic view of social reality.
Hans L. Zetterberg, born 1927 in Stockholm, Sweden, came to the University of Minnesota in 1949 and maintained United States as his main base for 20 years. He taught sociology at The Graduate School of Columbia University and briefly at Ohio State University, where he was Chairman of the Sociology Department. He was also publisher of Bedminster Press which had the motto: "Books by scholars for scholars." In his native country he was the first chief executive of The Tri-Centennial Fund of the Bank of Sweden, one of Europe's larger foundations supporting social science. He turned to the private sector as a longtime pollster, managing director and owner of a company, Sifo AB, for market and social research. He became editor-in-chief of a Stockholm newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet, and developed his writing to reach a curious general public. In a multi-volume work The Many-Splendored Society he sums up essential knowledge of social science. His key to social reality is simple: if mankind has the capacity to cook previously unheard-of sentences, it also has the capacity to cook and serve social structures never before seen.
Zetterberg is a past President of The World Association for Public Opinion Research.
