"[A] national cult of individualism and careerism threatened to turn America into a country of hypercompetitive loners ruled by tyrants."

Wrote Philip E. Slater in the 1970 book "The Pursuit of Loneliness," which sold half a million copies.

Having re-examined his life through the lens of his own book, Mr. Slater decided in 1971 to resign as the chairman of the sociology department at Brandeis University, where he had taught for 10 years, and take a different path. He took up acting, wrote novels and began culling his personal possessions down to the two boxes he left when he died at 86 on June 20 at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif....

He gave up his car, learned to live on one-fourth the income he was used to and began pursuing a life he would describe in a 1980 book, “Wealth Addiction,” as “voluntary simplicity."...

“The experience of losing everything and finding I was having a wonderful time,” he said, “opened me to experiences I otherwise would not have had. I would have protected myself from them if I had known.”

Sociology, circa 1970. I guess it couldn't last, this kind of sociology that made you not want to be a sociologist.