The Cognitive Foundations Of Classical Sociological Theory

"The Cognitive Foundations of Classical Sociological Theory explores the role that understandings of mind and brain played in the development of sociological theory"--

Foundations of Classical Sociological Theory: Functionalism, Conflict and Action provides an extensive analysis of classical sociological theory by giving readers an introduction to the life and ideas of all the eminent thinkers. The book begins by giving an overview of the emergence of sociology as a discipline in the background of socio-economic development that characterized Europe in 18th century. The first part of the book examines how the theorists viewed society as an organism; the second part takes cognizance of the conflict theory and third part deals with the emergence of action theory which took ambivalent position with regard to science and emphasized human agency and consciousness. Written in a very simple language, this book will help students delve deeper into the subject.

The Cognitive Foundations of Classical Sociological Theory explores the role that understandings of mind and brain played in the development of sociological theory. It isolates five key authors in the classical tradition and comprehensively explores their oeuvres for moments where they reflect on, engage with, and build from topics related to cognition, placing their work in contact with research today to critically determine areas of relevance, refutation, or revision. Showing how understandings of mind, brain, and body grounded the production of early sociological thought, the book draws attention to the foundational role theories of cognition played in the emergence of sociology as a distinct field of study. With chapters on Comte, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Mead, The Cognitive Foundations of Classical Sociological Theory constitutes a novel and timely engagement with canonical social theory, extending its application to contemporary social life. It will therefore appeal to scholars of sociology and psychology with interests in classical social theory, cognition, embodiment, and sociality.

A unique hybrid of text and readings, this book combines the major writings of sociology′s core classical and contemporary theorists with an historical as well as theoretical framework for understanding them. Laura Desfor Edles and Scott A Appelrouth provide not just a biographical and theoretical summary of each theorist/reading, but an overarching scaffolding which students can use to examine, compare and contrast each theorists′ major themes and concepts. No other theory text combines such student-friendly explanation and analysis with original theoretical works. Key features include: * Pedagogical devices and visual aids - charts, figures and photographs - to help summarize key concepts, illuminate complex ideas and provoke student interest * Chapters on well-known figures, such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Parsons and Foucault as well as an in-depth discussion of lesser known voices, such as Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, WEB Du Bois, and Leslie Sklair * Photos of not only the theorists, but of the historical milieu from which the theories arose as well as a glossary at the back

This is the first handbook focussing on classical social theory. It offers extensive discussions of debates, arguments, and discussions in classical theory and how they have informed contemporary sociological theory. The book pushes against the conventional classical theory pedagogy, which often focused on single theorists and their contributions, and looks at isolating themes capturing the essence of the interest of classical theorists that seem to have relevance to modern research questions and theoretical traditions. This book presents new approaches to thinking about theory in relationship to sociological methods.

This book revisits social theory with a view to highlighting certain essential features of ‘good’ social theory: its ability to raise certain questions, its explanatory power, its critical and reflexive interrogation of concepts, its search for objectivity, its concern to make sense of empirical data and its aim of projecting some degree of generality and abstraction. With particular attention to issues of nationalism, democracy, civil society, state, feminism, neoliberalism, minority rights, environment and North-East Indian society, it considers whether new and more relevant theoretical questions need to be asked. It will therefore appeal to scholars of social theory and political sociology with interests in new approaches to social theory and the development of local or ‘indigenous’ social thought.

Social Theory and the Political Imaginary: Practice, Critique and History is an innovative work of synthesis, critique, and analysis. It presages a social theory perspective that recognises the constitutive significance of the political imaginary in modernity. Social theory’s current dilemmas are explored through a series of interlinked asssessments of some of its recent substantial strands, specifically, Luc Boltanski’s pragmatism and the wider ‘practical turn’, the perspectives of multiple modernities and global modernity, the outlook of social and political imaginaries, and critical social theory. The political imaginary’s reconfigurations are evident in the tensions of global modernity and original social theory interpretations are advanced of landmark instances of twenty-first century social contestation: the Hong Kong protests conditioned by threats to civil freedoms and a lack of self-determination, the radical democratic practices of anti-austerity movements contesting capitalist globalisation’s injustices, and the inverted cosmopolitanism of the 2005 French Riots challenging the oppression and inequalities experienced by immigrant communities and marginalised youth. These incisive applications of social theory and complementary conceptual innovations illuminate the vicissitudes of social struggles, political forms, and theoretical perspectives. Similarly, reflection on the political imaginary is found to enable a necessary rethinking of the interrelationship of practice, critique and history.

In recent decades, the historical social sciences have moved away from deterministic perspectives and increasingly embraced the interpretive analysis of historical process and social and political change. This shift has enriched the field but also led to a deadlock regarding the meaning and status of subjective knowledge. Cultural interpretivists struggle to incorporate subjective experience and the body into their understanding of social reality. In the early twentieth century, philosopher Alfred Schutz grappled with this very issue. Drawing on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and Max Weber’s historical sociology, Schutz pioneered the interpretive analysis of social life from an embodied perspective. However, the recent interpretivist turn, influenced by linguistic philosophies, discourse theory, and poststructuralism, has overlooked the insights of Schutz and other phenomenologists. This book revisits Schutz’s phenomenology and social theory, positioning them against contemporary problems in social theory and interpretive social science research. The book extends Schutz’s key concepts of relevance, symbol relations, theory of language, and lifeworld meaning structures. It outlines Schutz’s critical approach to the social distribution of knowledge and develops his nascent sociology and political economy of knowledge. This book will appeal to readers with interests in social theory, phenomenology, and the methods of interpretive social science, including historical sociology, cultural sociology, science and technology studies, political economy, and international relations.

The book examines philosophical and sociological approaches within critical theory and more widely from the vantage point of communicative reason. It seeks to revitalize the sociological dimension of critical theory by advancing a critical sociology of reason. It does so fully in the knowledge that reason is a contentious concept in sociology and other disciplines. Nonetheless, building on Habermas’s original insight, it argues that an extensively modified version of communicative reason is indispensable. This modified approach will draw extensively from Peirce’s pragmatist semiotics and critical cognitive sociology. Such a focus has significant implications for meta-theoretical, theoretical-empirical, and methodological approaches in critical theory, critical sociology, and related disciplines. This book will be of interest to readers in the social sciences, humanities, and philosophy who value the importance of a social theory of a reasonable society for their disciplines and for increasingly essential interdisciplinary activities. The book will also appeal to many in critical theory and beyond who are interested in the cognitive foundations of normative orders, including unjust or pathological as well as actually or potentially just foundations. The book emphasizes both validity and critique within communicative reason and critical theory and accordingly presents a distinctive perspective on critical-reconstructive research.

This book begins with the distinction between the so-called lived body or felt body (Leib) and the physical body (Körper), tracing the conceptual history of this distinction through key figures in philosophical and social thoughts and articulating a theory of the lived body that draws on the New Phenomenology developed by Hermann Schmitz. An explanation of our being-in-the-world in terms of a felt-bodily communication with all perceived forms and their affective-bodily resonance in us, Being a Lived Body integrates and critically assesses the leading theories of embodiment while presenting a new approach to the body. It will, therefore, appeal to scholars of philosophy, social theory, and anthropology with interests in phenomenology and embodiment.