Foundations of Sociology I: Social Theory
Term:
Fall 2009
Subject Code:
GSOC
Course Number:
5101
This graduate seminar is a broad introduction to the central ideas and key works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber, whose concepts and questions continue to animate theoretical and empirical research in sociology. We focus primarily on what unites—and secondarily on what divides—these theorists and their contributions to the canon of sociological knowledge: the confrontation with the dualism of subject and object, criticism of utilitarian thought and normative political philosophy, the epistemological break with primary experience, theories of power and solidarity, the sociological discourse of modernity.
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