The author analyzes Durkheim's social theory from the standpoint of critical structuralism. She explores Durkheim's discussion of the relationship between the individual and society. She also addresses the question of Durkheim's understanding of the relationship between the subject and object of knowledge, and the relationship between truth and ideology.
The author analyzes Durkheim's social theory from the standpoint of critical structuralism. She explores Durkheim's discussion of the relationship between the individual and society. She also addresses the question of Durkheim's understanding of the relationship between the subject and object of knowledge, and the relationship between truth and ideology.
This is the first collection of essays to be published on Durkheim's masterpiece The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. It represents the work of the most important international Durkheim scholars from the fields of anthropology, philosophy and sociology. The essays focus on key topics including: * the method Durkheim adopted in his study * the role of ritual and belief in society * the nature of contemporary religion The contributors also explore cutting-edge debates about the notion of the soul and collective rituals.
Emile Durkheim's work on religion occupies a central place in religious studies classrooms today. This volume is designed as a resource for teachers, offering practical advice about productive ways to approach central texts and difficult pedagogical issues.
Reflecting emerging research and ongoing reassessments of social theory, The Wiley- Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists offers significant updates and revisions to the original Blackwell Companion published a decade ago. Volume 1 Features updates and revisions to all essays from original volume, plus the addition of 11 new authors Includes six new essays featuring coverage of theorists not included in original volume: Ibn Khaldun, de Tocqueville, Schumpeter, Mannheim, Veblen, and Adorno Supplemented with comprehensive bibliographies on primary and secondary sources, with a brief reader's guide accompanying each essay Addresses continuing relevance of most theories and their importance to contemporary scholarship Volume 2 Features updates and revisions to all essays from original volume, plus the addition of 16 new authors Includes 11 new essays featuring coverage of theorists not included in original volume, including Deleuze, Bauman, Smith, Luhmann, Agamben, and others Supplemented with comprehensive bibliographies on primary and secondary sources, with a brief reader's guide accompanying each essay Essays placed in social and historical context to allow readers to see how theorists have responded to pressing contemporary social and political issues
In his 2010 book What Is a Person?, Christian Smith argued that sociology had for too long neglected this fundamental question. Prevailing social theories, he wrote, do not adequately “capture our deep subjective experience as persons, crucial dimensions of the richness of our own lived lives, what thinkers in previous ages might have called our ‘souls’ or ‘hearts.’” Building on Smith’s previous work, To Flourish or Destruct examines the motivations intrinsic to this subjective experience: Why do people do what they do? How can we explain the activity that gives rise to all human social life and social structures? Smith argues that our actions stem from a motivation to realize what he calls natural human goods: ends that are, by nature, constitutionally good for all human beings. He goes on to explore the ways we can and do fail to realize these ends—a failure that can result in varying gradations of evil. Rooted in critical realism and informed by work in philosophy, psychology, and other fields, Smith’s ambitious book situates the idea of personhood at the center of our attempts to understand how we might shape good human lives and societies.
Social Functions of Synagogue Song: A Durkheimian Approach by Jonathan L. Friedmann paints a detailed picture of the important role sacred music plays in Jewish religious communities. This study explores one possible way to approach the subject of music’s intimate connection with public worship: applying sociologist Émile Durkeim’s understanding of ceremonial ritual to synagogue music. Durkheim observed that religious ceremonies serve disciplinary, cohesive, revitalizing, and euphoric functions within religious communities. Drawing upon musical examples from different composers, regions, periods, rites, and services, Friedmann demonstrates how Jewish sacred music performs these functions.
A concise, yet surprisingly comprehensive theory text, given the range of ideas, historical context, and theorists discussed. Unlike other books of the type, Classical Sociological Theory focuses on how the pivotal theories contributed not only to the development of the field, but also to the evolution of ideas concerning social life.
This book connects theorists and their work to larger themes and ideas. All too often, in the opinion of the authors, theory texts focus too much on individual theorists and insufficiently on the relationship between their theories, and how these have contributed, in turn, to the evolution of ideas concerning social life. Treatment of individual theories and theorists is balanced with the development of key themes; ideas about social life (introduced in Chapter 1) which then reappear in the discussion of individual theorists and their work. A key organizing principle of this text is to trace major schools of thought over the past 150 years as they appear and reappear in different chapters. Section 1 introductions help remind students of the "big picture" within which any given theory or theorist is only one part. A consistent organization and presentation within chapters helps provide students with a context for learning and a means of much more easily comparing and contrasting theorists and their ideas. Important, new voices in a text for social theory: In Chapter 2, Harriet Martineau is introduced as one of sociology′s founders. From then on, the views of women theorists and others are represented in far more than token fashion. Examples include W.E.B. DuBois, Marianne Weber, Charlotte Gilman, Rosa Luxemburg, Joseph Schumpeter, V. I. Lenin, Niklas Luhmann, Theda Skocpol, Erik Wright, Elman Service, Arlie Hochschild, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, and Immanual Wallerstein. · A timeline showing when social theorists lived and wrote and connecting their biographies to important social events over 300 years is at the back of the text. "The organization of every chapter along similar lines provides a consistency in presentation that encourages comparisons among the theorists...[The authors] do a very good job presenting overlooked theorists and making their relevance to social theorizing /doing sociology clear." --Joan Alway, formerly University of Miami "The strengths of this text are the breadth of theories covered, the integration of gender-related topics--family, work, religion; the use of substantial quotes from primary texts; the consistent inclusion of methodological issues; ...and the goals of the project to provide an expansive and readable theory text. I have no doubt that it will find a solid position in the field of popular theory texts for undergraduate course use." --Kathleen Slobin, North Dakota State University
