Committee on Social Thought

The Committee on Social Thought (German Committee for social thinking ) is one of several graduate colleges of the University of Chicago. It was founded in 1941 by the U.S. economic historian John Ulric Nef, in collaboration with the economist Frank Knight, anthropologist Robert Redfield and the then University President Robert Maynard Hutchins.

The committee is interdisciplinary and not limited to a particular subject area. Rather, scientists and writers have been brought together to the " awareness of the permanent questions at the origin of all learned inquiry" (Eng. about awareness of the issues of origin of all knowledge ) to promote.

Known members

Significant former members of the committee were, inter alia,

• The writer TS Eliot, Saul Bellow and JM Coetzee
• The political scientist Hannah Arendt, James E. Block, Allan Bloom and David Grene
• The sociologist Edward Shils
• The anthropologist Victor Turner
• The poet and philologist A. K. Ramanujan
• The philosopher Mircea Eliade, Yves Simon, Leszek Kolakowski, Stephen Toulmin, Paul Ricoeur
• And the economist Friedrich Hayek.

Eliot, Bellow, Coetzee and Hayek have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

There are currently, inter alia, the religious scholar Wendy Doniger, the theologian David Tracy, the psychologist and philosopher Jonathan Lear, the philosopher Robert B. Pippin, the classical scholar and literary scholar Glenn W. Most, the economist Robert Fogel, the historian of science Lorraine Daston, the sociologist Hans Joas and the poet Adam Zagajewski on the committee operates.

Weblink

• Committee on Social Thought - Homepage (English )

• University of Chicago
• Education in Illinois