L. T. Hobhouse as a Theoretical Sociologist

1974 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 307-319
Author(s):  
George Mariz

A glance at recent publications on the history of theoretical sociology in Europe would reveal that no one has yet attempted to write a full scale history of the early phases of that movement in Britain. There is certainly nothing that compares with Raymond Aron'sMain Currents in Sociological Thoughtfor British sociology. Aron's study, in fact, contains only scattered references to British thinkers and attaches little significance to them. Nor does this absence of Britishers result from some slight on Aron's part. While British sociology during the formative years of the discipline, roughly 1850-1930, did make some notable advances in its empirical branches, it produced no individual worthy to stand with theorists like Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto or Emil Durkheim.The reasons for this shortcoming on the British part are numerous and diverse. First, British thinking generally was concerned with more practical problems and not with theoretical matters and thus, automatically favored less abstract forms of social science. Additionally, those few British thinkers interested in problems of theory generally failed to recognize the significance of the advances of Continental mental philosophers and psychologists whose work has done so much to enrich twentieth century social theory. Yet there is a deeper and more subtle set of reasons interconnected with those aforementioned for the relative stasis of British social thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Nicolas Vallois

The late nineteenth century saw the multiplication of statistical studies on Jewish populations. This literature is now known as “Jewish Statistics” or “Jewish Social Science” (JSS). This article focuses on the articles published in Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden (Journal for Demography and Statistics of the Jews, ZDSJ). The ZDSJ was the main journal in JSS and appeared from 1905 until 1931.Existing scholarship on JSS has either focused on the influence of Zionism (Hart 2000) or eugenics and race theory (Efron 1994). This article proposes to relate JSS to the history of economics and statistics. As is suggested by the intellectual profile of the main contributors to the ZDSJ, we argue that JSS was a by-product of the German historical school in economics. Though JSS was intended for a mostly Jewish audience, its organization and methods were clearly inspired by those of German economists.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-180
Author(s):  
Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik

Abstract This article addresses the practices of collecting Chinese objects that were brought to the territory of present-day Slovenia by sailors, missionaries, travellers, and others who travelled to China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time, this territory was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; we will, therefore, begin with the brief historical context of the Empire and its contact with China, followed by a discussion on the nature of collecting Chinese objects in Slovenian territories at that time. We will further examine the status of the individuals who travelled to China and the nature and extent of the objects they brought back. The article will also highlight the specific position of the Slovenian territory within the history of Euro-Asian cultural connections, and address the relevant issues—locally and globally—of the relationship between the centres and peripheries with regard to collecting practices.


Author(s):  
Richard Swedberg

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.


Author(s):  
Laura Harris

In Experiments in Exile, I explore and compare projects undertaken by two twentieth-century American intellectuals while they lived in voluntary exiles in the United States: the Trinidadian writer and revolutionary C. L. R. James and the Brazilian visual artist and counterculturalist Hélio Oiticica. James and Oiticica never met. They lived and worked in the United States at different moments. My focus is on James’s stay during the 1940s and on Oiticica’s stay during the 1970s. Given the significant differences between them—not just at the level of nationality but at the level of race (James was black, Oiticica was white), class (James was situated within a precarious middle class, Oiticica was firmly established within an upper middle class), sexuality (James was straight, Oiticica was gay), and disciplinary locations (James is generally situated in the history of radical social theory and practice, and Oiticica is generally situated in the history of avant-garde aesthetic theory and practice)—this is surely an unlikely combination. This study is itself an experiment, one that goes beyond the usual parameters of comparativist or transnational research, to identify, in the surprising resonances between the projects pursued by these two very disparate figures, a common project I believe they, together, bring into relief....


Author(s):  
Rachel Hallote

When the artistic canon of the Southern Levant coalesced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars thought of the region, then Ottoman Palestine, as the locus of the Bible. The small-scale nature of the archaeological finds as well as their relative dearth reinforced a reliance on biblical narratives as a framework for understanding the culture of the region. Moreover, early scholarship did not recognize the complex regionalism of the Southern Levant or the diversity of its populations. Consequently, the artistic canon that developed did not represent the historical and archaeological realities of the region. This chapter examines the history of how the artistic canon of the Southern Levant formed over the past century of scholarship, why various scholars of the early and middle twentieth century included particular items in the canon, and why these now entrenched representations may or may not be helpful to the discipline’s future.


2019 ◽  
pp. 131-159
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Rotter

The chapter provides a sensory history of empire in the two countries, India and the Philippines, at the turn of the twentieth century. By that point, the process of visualizing Indian and Filipino subjects was well underway by their colonizers. The chapter looks at sight and sound and how they can be used to narrate the story at this point. The dynamics of Anglo-American soundscapes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transferred readily and deliberately to sites of empire, to India and the Philippines. In particular, it looks at the music in the two empires at this time.


Author(s):  
Gerard P. Loughlin

This chapter considers how gay identities—and so gay affections—were formed in the course of the twentieth century, building on the late nineteenth-century invention of the ‘homosexual’. It also considers earlier construals of same-sex affections and the people who had them, the soft men and hard women of the first century and the sodomites of the eleventh. It thus sketches a history of continuities and discontinuities, of overlapping identities and emotional possibilities. The chapter resists the assumption that gay identity and experience can be reduced to anything less than the multitude of gay people, and that as Christians they have to give an account of themselves in a way that heterosexual Christians do not. The chapter warns against thinking gay identity undone in Christ.


1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wyatt Macgaffey

Recent accounts of the proto-history of Africa use data from physical anthropology, but also concepts of race which physical anthropologists in general have abandoned as unsatisfactory; the paper seeks to explain this phenomenon sociologically. Late nineteenth-century political and sociological trends helped to produce patterns of thought which can no longer be regarded as affording adequate explanations of social processes. These patterns combined idealism, or the method of contrasting ideal types, with pseudo-Darwinism, which sought the origins of political development in the interaction of differently endowed groups. In African ethnography of the early twentieth century such concepts led to the view that the continent was inhabited by two groups, Caucasoids and Negroids, and by mixtures of the two which remained mixtures, to be analysed as such. The Caucasoid and Negroid types were regarded as absolute and universal, represented equally in the biological, linguistic, cultural and political aspects of man.


2020 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 434-454
Author(s):  
Dan D. Cruickshank

This article uses the history of the Ornaments Rubric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to explore the emergence of claims to self-governance within the Church of England in this period and the attempts by parliament to examine how independent the legal system of the church was from the secular state. First, it gives an overview of the history of the Ornaments Rubric in the various editions of the Book of Common Prayer and the Acts of Uniformity, presenting the legal uncertainty left by centuries of Prayer Book revision. It then explores how the Royal Commission into Ritualism (1867–70) and the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874) attempted to control Ritualist interpretations of the Ornaments Rubric through secular courts. Examining the failure of these attempts, it looks towards the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline (1904–6). Through the evidence given to the commission, it shows how the previous royal commission and the work of parliament and the courts had failed to stop the continuation of Ritualist belief in the church's independence from secular courts. Using the report of the royal commission, it shows how the commissioners attempted to build a via media between strict spiritual independence and complete parliamentary oversight.


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