The title of this volume, Surrounded by Symbols, describes mankind's unique environment. The book tells how freedom in using language creates social reality. A language for civility and scholarship avoids spuma, magic, and defensive bilge. Taking a telescoping view, we study vibrations in symbolic environments between tradition and modernity, faithfulness and pragmatism, and between materialism and humanism. Taking a microscopic view, we see the descriptive, evaluative, and prescriptive language, often imbued with emotions, forming a universal minimum vocabulary of social reality.
About the Author: Hans L. Zetterberg, born 1927 in Stockholm, Sweden, came to the University of Minnesota in 1949 and did maintain The Unit-ed States as his main base for 20 years. He taught sociology at the Graduate School of Columbia University and at Ohio State University, where he was Chairman of the Sociology Depart-ment. He was also the head of publishing at Bedminster Press, which had the motto: "Books by scholars for scholars." In his native country, Zetterberg was the first Chief Executive and organizer 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 and became a long-established professional pollster, Managing Director and owner of Sifo AB, a company for market and social research. He became Editor-in-Chief of the national daily newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet, and further developed his writing to reach an inquisitive general public. Zetterberg is a past President of The World Association for Public Opinion Research. He is a member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. In a multi-volume work in progress, The Many-Splendored Soci-ety, Zetterberg sums up essential knowledge of social science. His key to social reality is simple and optimistic: if humanity has the capacity to cook previously unheard-of sentences, it also has the capacity to cook and serve social structures and cultures never before seen. However, only a minority of our sentences is new from generation to generation, and it takes effort to create sets of new ones. Societies and their institutions, likewise, can count on both long traditions and on manageable changes. The Many-Splendored Society is a great story about this achievement.