“Review of *Culture and Democracy: The Struggle for Form in Society and Architecture in Chicago and the Middle West during the Life and Times of Louis H. Sullivan*, by Hugh Dalziel Duncan”

AboutWilliam H. Jordy's brief review assesses sociologist Hugh Dalziel Duncan's *Culture and Democracy* (1965), a study situating Sullivan's architectural "functionalism" within the broader intellectual ferment of Chicago pragmatism. Jordy summarizes Duncan's central, somewhat overstated claim that the Chicago schools of philosophy, sociology, and education were effectively "born" in the Chicago School of architecture, and traces Duncan's parallels between Sullivan's ideas and Thorstein Veblen's "instinct of workmanship," John Dewey's instrumentalism, George Herbert Mead's "consummatory phase of the act," and Charles Cooley's "sympathetic understanding," noting the book's partial overlap with Sherman Paul's earlier *Louis Sullivan: An Architect in American Thought*. He credits Duncan's account of how money and civic ambition intertwined in Chicago — evoking William James's remarked-upon "sense of concrete reality" in the city's culture — but finds the book's later chapters, covering the Chicago School's architectural origins and the World's Columbian Exposition, thin and secondhand, and judges Duncan's own architectural criticism as a sociologist to be "trite and uncertain." Jordy concludes that Sullivan's writings alone cannot fully explain his ambiguous place in American culture, a problem the book does not resolve.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8762%28196610%2972%3A1%3C320%3ACADTSF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4