The concept of classes in early work of F. Engels

Author(s):  
SERHII MAKEIEV

In 2020 the scientific community celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Engels with numerous publications, conferences, and meetings. But as if by tradition representatives of various social and humanitarian disciplines, including sociologists, were and remain to this day, surprisingly inattentive (or indifferent) to the concepts of classes and class analysis presented by the founder of Marxism in his first book «The Condition of the Working Class in England», published in 1845. Modern life writers of F. Engels usually rank the work as a genre of high-quality journalistic investigations, as an engaged political journalism, as the first publications on the problem of urbanization, and as one of the best examples of a fiction book about the life and customs of the Victorian era. The article substantiates its belonging to the social and humanitarian science in accordance with today’s ideas about the relevance of scientific research. A sociological explication and interpretation of the views on the formation, evolution and prospects for the participation of large groups of people in the process of transforming social orders are proposed. The first part presents the biographical context of Engels’ writing of his first major work, as well as some post-biographical facts about the memory of his stay in Manchester in connection with the living conditions of English workers. The second part lists those conceptual constructs that can be taken for the concept of classes.

1961 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Coe

1. The Classic Khmer and the Classic Maya civilizations had cult centers but not true cities. They both arose in areas which were regionally undifferentiated.2. Easy transportation and heavy trade were lacking because of the areawide uniformity of crops and the difficult terrain. Consequently, urban centers were not and could not be supported.3. Both areas did produce a surplus and therefore could support civilized life. The social orders of each were so set up that through religious sanctions this surplus, which included labor, could be utilized for the creation and support of huge cult centers. Such a kind of organization might be considered as unilateral (mechanical) in the Durkheimian sense.4. In contrast, true cities arose in productive agricultural areas which were regionally specialized, with symbiotic interdependence of a Maussian nature. Trade and trade routes were highly developed so that commodity prices were sufficiently low to enable large groups of persons engaged in commerce to live together and yet make a profit on their activities. Internally specialized civilizations of this sort have been termed organic.5. It is suggested that among the organic civilizations, the state may have had its origin in the regulation of trade; among the unilateral civilizations, in the compulsion of tribute and corvee labor.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam G. B. Roberts ◽  
Anna Roberts

Group size in primates is strongly correlated with brain size, but exactly what makes larger groups more ‘socially complex’ than smaller groups is still poorly understood. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) are among our closest living relatives and are excellent model species to investigate patterns of sociality and social complexity in primates, and to inform models of human social evolution. The aim of this paper is to propose new research frameworks, particularly the use of social network analysis, to examine how social structure differs in small, medium and large groups of chimpanzees and gorillas, to explore what makes larger groups more socially complex than smaller groups. Given a fission-fusion system is likely to have characterised hominins, a comparison of the social complexity involved in fission-fusion and more stable social systems is likely to provide important new insights into human social evolution


2019 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 165-170
Author(s):  
Aleksey V.  Lomonosov

The article reveals the social significance of determining the political views of V.V. Rozanov in the system of the thinker’s worldview. The correlation of these views with his political journalism is shown. The genesis of social and political ideas of V.V. Rozanov is revealed. The author specifies his ideological predecessors in the sphere of public thought of the late 19th century and the thinker’s affiliation with the conservative political camp of Russian writers. The author of the article also gives coverage of the V.V. Rozanov’s polemical publications in the press. He outlines the circle of political sympathies and determinative constants in the political views of Rozanov-publicist and proves his commitment to the centrist political parties. The author examines the process of Rozanov’s socio-political views evolution at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, and the related changes in his political journalism. The evaluations are based on the large layer of Rozanov’s newspaper publicism in the years of 1905–1917. To determine the Rozanov’s position in the “New time” journal editorial office and to reveal the motives of his political essays the author of the article used epistola


Author(s):  
Robert Pippin

This is the first detailed interpretation of J. M. Coetzee’s “Jesus” trilogy as a whole. Robert Pippin treats the three “fictions” as a philosophical fable, in the tradition of Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Rousseau’s Emile, or Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place, and they have all had most of the memories of their homeland “erased.” While also discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of the implications of a deeper kind of spiritual homelessness, a version that characterizes late modern life itself, and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge. So, the state of exile is interpreted as “metaphysical” as well as geographical. In the course of an interpretation of the central narrative about a young boy’s education, Pippin shows how a number of issues arise, are discussed and lived out by the characters, all in ways that also suggest the limitations of traditional philosophical treatments of themes like eros, beauty, social order, art, family, non-discursive forms of intelligibility, self-deception, and death. Pippin also offers an interpretation of the references to Jesus in the titles, and he traces and interprets the extensive inter-textuality of the fictions, the many references to the Christian Bible, Plato, Cervantes, Goethe, Kleist, Wittgenstein, and others. Throughout, the attempt is to show how the literary form of Coetzee’s fictions ought to be considered, just as literary—a form of philosophical reflection.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 55-62
Author(s):  
Nicholas Overgaard

Although we accept that a scientific mosaic is a set of theories and methods accepted and employed by a scientific community, scientific community currently lacks a proper definition in scientonomy. In this paper, I will outline a basic taxonomy for the bearers of a mosaic, i.e. the social agents of scientific change. I begin by differentiating between accidental group and community through the respective absence and presence of a collective intentionality. I then identify two subtypes of community: the epistemic community that has a collective intentionality to know the world, and the non-epistemic community that does not have such a collective intentionality. I note that both epistemic and non-epistemic communities might bear mosaics, but that epistemic communities are the intended social agents of scientific change because their main collective intentionality is to know the world and, in effect, to change their mosaics. I conclude my paper by arguing we are not currently in a position to properly define scientific community per se because of the risk of confusing pseudoscientific communities with scientific communities. However, I propose that we can for now rely on the definition of epistemic community as the proper social agent of scientific change.Suggested Modifications[Sciento-2017-0012]: Accept the following taxonomy of group, accidental group, and community:Group ≡ two or more people who share any characteristic.Accidental group ≡ a group that does not have a collective intentionality.Community ≡ a group that has a collective intentionality. [Sciento-2017-0013]: Provided that the preceding modification [Sciento-2017-0012] is accepted, accept that communities can consist of other communities.[Sciento-2017-0014]: Provided that modification [Sciento-2017-0012] is accepted, accept the following definitions of epistemic community and non-epistemic community as subtypes of community:Epistemic community ≡ a community that has a collective intentionality to know the world.Non-epistemic community ≡ a community that does not have a collective intentionality to know the world.[Sciento-2017-0015]: Provideed that modification [Sciento-2017-0013] and [Sciento-2017-0014] are accepted, accept that a non-epistemic community can consist of epistemic communities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-167
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Sokół

The subject of this essay is Andrzej Waśkiewicz’s book Ludzie – rzeczy – ludzie. O porządkach społecznych, gdzie rzeczy łączą, nie dzielą (People–Things–People: On Social Orders Where Things Connect Rather Than Divide People). The book is the work of a historian of ideas and concerns contemporary searches for alternatives to capitalism: the review presents the book’s overview of visions of society in which the market, property, inequality, or profit do not play significant roles. Such visions reach back to Western utopian social and political thought, from Plato to the nineteenth century. In comparing these ideas with contemporary visions of the world of post-capitalism, the author of the book proposes a general typology of such images. Ultimately, in reference to Simmel, he takes a critical stance toward the proposals, recognizing the exchange of goods to be a fundamental and indispensable element of social life. The author of the review raises two issues that came to mind while reading the book. First, the juxtaposition of texts of a very different nature within the uniform category of “utopia” causes us to question the role and status of reflections regarding the future and of speculative theory in contemporary social thought; second, such a juxtaposition suggests that reflecting on the social “optimal good” requires a much more precise and complex conception of a “thing,” for instance, as is proposed by new materialism or anthropological studies of objects and value as such.


2003 ◽  
pp. 37-45
Author(s):  
Oleksiy R. Tytarenko

The main purpose of Christian social teaching is to form a person's Christian outlook, to provide the Christian with answers to the questions of the present and specific recommendations regarding the model of behavior in different situations in life. In its turn, social doctrine expresses a confessional perspective on the problems of modern life faced by believers. This view is formulated in special documents of denominations, the totality of which constitutes the "social doctrine of the Church"


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3.14) ◽  
pp. 331
Author(s):  
Anna Viktorovna Grishina ◽  
Elena Nikolaevna Volkova

In the era of intensive informatization of society, computer becomes an integral part of the modern life of the younger teenagers. In Russia, the number of children spending time in front of monitors, playing computer games at home or in a computer club, increases every day. According to Entermedia LLC, the percentage of sales of computer games increases by 50% annually. Currently, 23% of the population of Russia plays computer games, at that the minimum age for a computer player is two years.Strengthening polarization regarding children's interest to computer games becomes one of the most important problems. What is meant here is the fact that, on the one hand, there are adolescents, whose interest in computer games is quite sustainable, while, on the other hand, there are also schoolchildren experiencing mild interest or no interest at all to computer games. The relevance of the present work is determined by the social danger of the phenomenon called high passion for computer games, which deforms, and sometimes blocks the development of the most important personal entities [3, 5, 9, 12, 15]. In this regard, the investigation of the features of personal agency in younger adolescents, which is responsible for the self-regulation of behavior and activity of a subject, is of particular importance. 


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jordan Kuiti

<p>Transport infrastructure is a key aspect of any city. The ability to move large groups of people into and through the city can positively or negatively affect the public life associated with that city. With this in mind transport infrastructure is often designed in a very technical manner, which seeks to move maximum numbers of people around the system as fast as possible for the least amount of money. There seems to be a lack of embrace of other aspects associated with transport infrastructure. These other aspects include public life, place making, enjoyment, and what is the transport adding to the city? With the population of New Zealand’s cities increasing, more money is being allocated to transport infrastructure projects. With a change in approach these projects could work functionally but also offer other benefits, such as public life, new development, enhanced identity, and importantly a more liveable city for the inhabitants. Instead of the functional aspects of transport infrastructure being the only driver, a more holistic approach should be utilised which takes into account the social and public life generating potential. Wellington City has been chosen as a test site as it is an example of a city currently going through transport infrastructure upgrades whilst also struggling with future transport issues. Situated in a unique harbour setting the waterfront is split from the CBD with a traffic heavy six-lane road. The harbour offers a transport resource that is not being utilised. Ferry transport offers a new approach to transport in Wellington that offers greater benefits than just moving people around the system. This thesis proposes a fresh look at transport infrastructure in Wellington with the development of a ferry network designed to service the entire Wellington Harbour. Through researching the development potentials offered by transport networks this thesis argues that a holistic approach to transport infrastructure can have wider reaching benefits that just moving people around the system efficiently.</p>


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