Marx
The class that owns the means of production within a capitalist economy.
The bourgeoisie
Durkheim felt that social integration was an essential component in the health and functionality of a society. He used these two concepts to articulate his notion of social integration.
Mechanical and organic solidarity
Weber wrote this book in an attempt to explain how the capitalist system developed in Western Europe.
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Du Bois uses this concept to define race as a political, social relation between groups of people rather than a series of objective, biological categories that are naturally occurring.
The color line
This theorist wrote the now-infamous phrase "You have nothing to lose but your chains!"
Karl Marx
Marx used this concept to describe the way workers are denied agency in the labor process, from a lack of choice in what and how commodities are produced all the way to a denial of workers' own creativity and humanity.
Alienation
This type of solidarity describes integration and cohesion through likeness, performing similar tasks, and having similar goals.
Mechanical solidarity
Weber argued that these three ideal types comprise the forms of authority which, together, govern modern life.
Traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational authority
This book by Du Bois argues, among other things, that enslaved Black people used strategies like the general strike and military mobilization to emancipate themselves during the Civil War, pushing against narratives of the federal government bearing full responsibility for the emancipation of enslaved people.
Black Reconstruction
This theorist was concerned with creating an objective social science that would function much like the natural sciences.
Hint: students often misgender them.
Emile Durkheim
The class that owns its labor power and must sell it on the labor market.
The proletariat
In his book of the same name, Durkheim used suicide as an example of this concept, which describes "manners of acting, thinking, and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him" (Durkheim; 1982: 52). These manners, thoughts, and feelings are general to a society at a given time.
Social fact
A paradigm shift wherein social life and institutions move away from emotional, value-based, and traditional forms of motivation/authority and towards efficiency, calculability, and reason.
Rationalization
A feeling of being caught between two contradictory definitions of self, with one being your understanding of yourself and the other being the way you are understood by a dominant political group/class. This feeling is a product of power imbalances and was first used to describe the contradictory position Black Americans occupied as second-class citizens within U.S. white supremacy.
Double consciousness
This theorist is Kathryn's personal favorite to teach.
W.E.B. Du Bois
This concept describes the process of attributing an inherent value to things regardless of the labor time expended during the production process.
Commodity fetishism
Durkheim posited that organic solidarity was a more evolved form of social integration than mechanical solidarity. To convey this idea, he developed this concept, which describes the “beliefs and sentiments” average citizens of a society share in common.
Collective consciousness
Weber uses this metaphor to describe the future of Western society if we continue down the path of rationalization and disenchantment, a future he famously described as "the polar night of icy darkness."
The iron cage
Du Bois used this metaphor to describe the political barriers that separate groups of people from full citizenship within a society.
The veil
This theorist is often regarded as one of the most pessimistic of the founding fathers of sociology for his bleak prediction of the future of human life.
Hint: he wins the crown of the most pro-Western supremacy theorist of the semester
Max Weber
Marx, through a critique of Hegel, developed this process for analyzing how the conditions which give rise to an institution can also bring about its demise.
Dialectical materialism
Durkheim used this concept to describe unestablished but powerful collective expressions of sentiment that might spontaneously manifest within social gatherings.
Collective effervescence
Weber's theory of understanding meanings and interpretations people assign to social phenomenon.
Hint: German word
Verstehen
The color line requires multiple strategies to be maintained. Some of these are ____, about the realm of ideas, language, and controlling images, while others are _____, about the realm of tangible resources.
Symbolic and material strategies
This theorist wrote the phrase "the cause for war is the preparation for war," and used his research to critique militarism around the globe.
W.E.B. Du Bois