Leopold von Wiese and the ambivalence of functionalist sociology

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Liebersohn
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Personal Agency ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
Biological Determinism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Structural Functionalism

‘Spencer is dead’, wrote Talcott Parsons at the beginning of The Structureof Social Action, ‘but who killed him and how ? This is the problem’. In this study, which was both the foundation of Parsons’ structural-functionalism and a major reinterpretation of the history of modern social science, Spencer stood for a vanquished schoolof social thought. He represented positivism at the suicidal extreme where its naive individualism fell apart, paradoxically passing over into its antithesis, a biological determinism precluding individual initiative. His thought had died at the intersection of individual and society.Beyond this point, Parsons discovered the rise of a new social theory in Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim and Weber. From these four thinkers, working independently of one another, Parsons tried to put together the pieces of a system, succeeding where Spencer had decisively failed, reconciling personal agency and social order.

The Role of Theory

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Swedberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Types Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

This chapter looks at the role of theory in theorizing. Knowing theory, in order to be good at theorizing in social science, is not the same as having a knowledge of the history of social theory. It is true that it is helpful to have some of the skills of an intellectual historian when one tries to figure out what a concept means, why a theory looks the way it does today, and similar issues. However, this is not the kind of knowledge that one basically needs to have in order to be good at theorizing. The two types of knowledge that are needed in order to theorize well are knowledge of the basics of social theory and knowledge of a number of concepts, mechanisms, and theories.

scholarly journals Recovering critique in an age of datafication

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (7) ◽  
pp. 1135-1151
Author(s):  
Nick Couldry
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Questions

This article starts out from the need for critical work on processes of datafication and their consequences for the constitution of social knowledge and the social world. Current social science work on datafication has been greatly shaped by the theoretical approach of Bruno Latour, as reflected in the work of Actor Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies (ANT/STS). The article asks whether this approach, given its philosophical underpinnings, provides sufficient resources for the critical work that is required in relation to datafication. Drawing on Latour’s own reflections about the flatness of the social, it concludes that it does not, since key questions, in particular about the nature of social order cannot be asked or answered within ANT. In the article’s final section, three approaches from earlier social theory are considered as possible supplements to ANT/STS for a social science serious about addressing the challenges that datafication poses for society.

The development of Garfinkel’s ‘Trust’ argument from 1947 to 1967: Demonstrating how inequality disrupts sense and self-making

2020 ◽  
pp. 1468795X1989442
Author(s):  
Jason Turowetz ◽  
Anne Warfield Rawls
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Systematic Research ◽  
Transgender Identity ◽  
Du Bois

Garfinkel began developing his famous Trust argument, that a minimum of equality and reciprocity he called ‘Trust Conditions’ is a prerequisite for sense-making in interaction, while working with Parsons from 1946 to 1952. The argument grounds a social justice approach to social order and meaning with affinities to Durkheim’s ‘implicit conditions of contract’ and Du Bois’ ‘double consciousness’. Tracing the development of the Trust argument, we examine 14 unpublished PhD proposals from 1948 in which Garfinkel formulated his approach through studies of Jewish identity that, with his earlier research on Race and subsequent studies of the ‘pre-medical candidate’ and transgender identity, demonstrate how inequality disrupts normal ordinary practices of sense and self-making. As a social theory, Garfinkel’s position builds on approaches to social action, interaction and language by Parsons, Schutz and Wittgenstein. As a systematic research programme, however, Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology charted new territory. Inspired by his own experiences as a Jewish man, he was the first to focus on how interactional troubles reveal the ‘hidden’ taken-for-granted details of how social objects and identities are cooperatively achieved in interaction and document how inequality interferes with that achievement.

The Vavilov Brothers

Slavic Review ◽  
1965 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Joravsky
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Dominant Mode ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Scientific Principles ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Scientific Socialism ◽  
Great Wall

Social science in the Russian revolution is as big a topic as theology in the Protestant Reformation. So it must be set aside with the inevitable “few observations,” guidelines for a future history of social thought in Soviet Russia. The dominant mode is that of Kafka's “Great Wall of China“: masters of scientific socialism, energetically rebuilding society on scientific principles, are gradually brought to suspect that they have no social science. Marx and Lenin come more and more to resemble Kafka's Emperor; their dying word would make everything clear, but it cannot reach the builders through the overwhelming crush of ordinary men and grubby circumstance. Reports that the word still reaches distant backward places like Vietnam only heighten the bewilderment.

scholarly journals Spaces of a Technological Power: The Idea of Order (from the History of Ideas)

Lex Russica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
I. A. Isaev
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Order ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Moral Justification ◽  
Powerful Source ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law ◽  
Special Space

The paper is devoted to one of the fundamental problems of social science, namely: the problem of order. When a social order is taken for granted, it merges its meanings with the meanings rooted in cosmos.Nomos and cosmos begin to coexist. The order is endowed with a stabilizing force drawn from a more powerful source, i.e. cosmization implies the identification of this meaningful world with the world as such.The power and the law in their actions are aimed at creating and maintaining order as a system. The system itself develops the structure of technology formation aimed at both maintaining the existing order and changing it. Technology, as an anonymous power, dominates the society, but the society itself makes itself dependent on technology by deciding to apply technology. Thus, a special space of technological power emerges where actual influences determining its structure are expressed. The power and law acquire qualitatively new features in this context.The technology of power can be understood as a kind of “democracy.” It can be normalized in accordance with its constitutional prerequisites and it can restore its long-lost moral justification.

Sociological insight through the history of social thought: A dialogue about Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-160
Author(s):  
Chad Alan Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Sociology Of Knowledge ◽  
Comparative Investigation ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Research ◽  
University Of Chicago Press

This essay is part of a symposium on Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and responds to comments on the book by Angel Adams Parham, Joseph Gerteis, Peter Kivisto, and Fuyuki Kurasawa. As all these commentators recognize, the history of social theory at its best involves more than conserving, inculcating, and consecrating the sociological canon or even remaking the canon through the addition of previously neglected authors. The history of social theory also allows scholars to address fundamental questions in the sociology of knowledge, the comparative investigation of different kinds of alterity, and the study of social solidarity and belonging. This essay reflects on how best to address these questions and suggests ways that new research in the history of social thought can build upon and extend existing scholarship.

scholarly journals The counter-revolution of criminological science: a study on the abuse of reasoned punishment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Daniel D'Amico
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Formal Modeling ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Statistical Measurement ◽  
History Of

Trends in the history of social science dedicated to the study of crime and punishment are presented as a case study supporting F.A. Hayek's theory of social change. Designing effective social institutions and public policies first requires an accurate vision of how society operates. An accurate model of society further requires scientific methods uniquely suited for the study of human beings as purposeful agents and the study of human institutions as complex social phenomena. If guided by faulty methods, theories are inaccurate and policy outcomes veer from their intentions. Hayek termed such outcomes "abuses of reason". Aiming to replicate the objectivity of physical sciences via formal modeling and statistical measurement, economists throughout the 20th century imposed an excessively technical vision of human decision-making. Policy failures and social problems resulted. This paper argues that the historical trends of applied social science dedicated to crime and punishment can be understood similarly. Formal modeling and statistical measurement continuously displaced methods more attuned to human intentionality and social complexity. In result, amidst a long-run history of intellectual and political change, US law enforcement and criminal punishment policies became technocratic, and outcomes became disjointed from their stated intentions to promote social order and welfare.

Shelling from the ivory tower

Focaal ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (80) ◽  
pp. 105-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Y. Kao
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
Models Of Development ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Foundations ◽  
Historical Examination ◽  
Project Camelot

This article is a historical examination of several watershed episodes in the militarization of US social science. It off ers an assessment of the actual “science” underpinning such initiatives as Project Camelot, and traces how American anthropology in its reaction to Project Camelot and Cold War studies moved from certain kinds of scientific/knowledge production toward others. By critiquing the intellectual foundations of Project Camelot alongside other examples of action-oriented social science, this article examines the connections between functionalism and the conceptual bias toward social order. What linked development, militarism, and imperialism was a more often than not oversimplified view of human behavior. In order to comprehend how models of development and modernization continue to shape American hegemony, this article scrutinizes a particular history of “military modernity.”

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