What is Sociology I?
Coined the term "sociology"
August Comte
T/F: Society is a system of immutable and reified structures and institutions operating as a law-like system of objectively organized relationships that determines all action within it.
FALSE! Society is not a system of immutable and reified structures...SOCIETY IS ALWAYS CHANGING, therefore society is not a system of immutable (cant be changed) structures!
1789 - 1871:The Age of Revolution
He locates it in 28th century
At the end of the franco-prussian war is the unification of germany
France prior to the war, was the superpower in continental Europe but the balance of power changed as a result of this war and what you had was a unified
Sociology came to term during this great upheaval - what happened is that absolute monarchy/ the rule of king or queen over the subjects was disrupted - ordinary people became not just subjects but people who are bearing rights (that must be protected)
There is also great genocide happening here (indigenous, indentureship of people from west africa)
This great upheaval that we don't know - you could imagine the world as a place if unchanging relations
For the first time that society is changing, change is a different idea, for the first time human beings in that era thought that they can effect change and produce change not just God
Therefore when we say social theory, think of this historical gap between social practice and political ideals - political ideals are always like a horizon we all want a just society but as we get closer to it its recedes - social theory tries to bridge that gap by offering ideas about how this action should look like and in what fashion it should be affected
In this age of revolution there are 3 ideas - freedom, equality and fraternity (solidarity) - seen through the scholars of this time
Alexandre Kojève
Historically because he was a professor to so many thinkers = to many who set the stage for postwar french intellectual life
He has an understanding of history
What do all these wars mean especially for europan civilization
What we witness with savagery of europe is disappearance of men (men as a genre disappearing - the being that replaced god and is in control in the making of the planet the master of the universe)
If classical social theory began as a response to revolution and by acknowledging the imperative of historical change, it appears to end with the prospect of human annihilation in warfare and by radically rethinking the very possibility of historical meaning. - he thinks about the meaning of history
T/F There are no methods that perfectly mirror nature and that don’t need to be explicated, explained, defined, worried through.
TRUE!
There are no methods that perfectly mirror nature (nature in the sense that how things exactly are) and don’t need to be explicated, explained, defined, worried through (because the stakes are high). Positivism is the illusion that such methods exist. (p. 444) (question for midterm)
Sociology has 2 tasks
Sociology has 2 tasks: 1) look at how societies change overtime 2) the relationship between the individual and collective - how individuals relate to larger groups/communities
Positivism
Aim to free knowledge from religious belief and metaphysical speculation
Karl Marx
Classless society
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- She was a white woman
an estranged experience of being both part of and excluded from society.
Articulates her own experience of a twin soul or the bifurcated (a road that is forking) experience of an estranged self and its other, but rather for the more homely artefacts of the mass media and popular culture, especially those that were produced by or for women. (p. 8)
As a women, i do not experience america as this amazing place
Social regulation depends on kind of gender and racialised in our examples so far of a particular society
Not addressed as equal citizen but given different roles according to the society
Methodology
Systematic ways of knowing, including quantitative data analysis (how do you gather and use the data), qualitative analyses, literature, poetry, art, theory. Our methods are the ways of making arguments for the validity of what we know. In order to ensure the validity of our arguments, were using a systematic way of knowing, and thats what methodology is!
What brought upon all this social change?
Colonialism - brought people in from other places to work
Then starts Slavery - happening in Europe and here
Capitalism - now becomes the main way of organizing
Rationalization - something different called the "state" comes in promises to do things in the most efficient way
Secularization (transition from religious to more worldly level) - morality has changed, where does morality go to? It goes into the culture part of the cube as we see a change in culture
Thus a discipline (way of thinking) is born!
Social change is part of the 6 sociological themes! We see how then we start to analyze patterns, institutions, meaning etc.,
Society is possible because of my _______ in it? Explain what this means.
Society is possible because of my participation in it!
- Moving your body is just a behaviour but you are doing it because being a student means something so you are taking the bus and putting it into action there is meaning behind you moving your limbs to take the bus (that was just a behaviour)
- think about social order - is not simply given (prior to existence) or made once and for all (you have to maintain it), but rather achieved (takes participation in society in particular forms) through a process which involves binding individuals from within by satisfying their needs and desires
Harriet Martineau + Alexis de Tocquevill
They went to America:
Martineau - despite ideas of freedom, you have slavery
- Country that argues to be land of the free is built on the unfreedom of people
- More than that, women are dismissed in the field of education - there is no place for women
Tocquevill:
Understand democracy in America - having people vote - but he saw it it is more understood as a something of the majority rather than a system that is well balanced
- We mistake democracy in being the head count in having the greater number
- Democracy needs to be supported within a set of institutions that balances the rights of those in both majority and minority
General (but important) ideas:
- Unlike Marx, Martineau and de Tocqueville didn’t produce a “grand theory” of history.
- Instead, they focused on detailed studies of everyday life — customs, morals, and manners.
Looking at concerns with detailed study of intimate and overlook aspects of life (customs, morals) - helping sociologists to think everyday life what you did morning to now as a subject worthy of studying.
Not only about big societal changes but about how these changes are producing different patterns of life
- Martineau critiqued America’s contradictions: a “land of the free” built on slavery and the exclusion of women.
- Tocqueville warned of the “tyranny of the majority,” arguing democracy required balancing minority and majority rights.
Both show how ordinary experiences and institutions reveal contradictions in society, even in moments of upheaval.
Sigmund Freud
Sociology is turning more and more to individual psyche - not thinking of psyche as private property; the making of my psychological structure is not a private affair but a social one; by using Freud's work, the mechanism that we observe are all conditioned by the broader structures of social change
Hes giving us a way of thinking about how the individual and the collective are not 2 separate things but they exist in a relationship of mutual formation - never exempt from society there is no private life (some aspects we do live private)
Knowledge is __________. What does this mean?
Knowledge is perspectival!
6 Sociological themes (or areas of analysis for sociology)
Social Change - Patterns - institutions - Meaning - Individual/Collective...bringing us to the concept that "sociology is the study of social relations, social structure, and social institutions!"
Define being explicit and reflexive
In terms of vantage point - we are being explicit about the presuppositions and reflexive about the vantage point from which the knowledge is bring produced
Emile Durkheim
How social order is not simply given (prior to existence) or made once and for all (you have to maintain it), but rather achieved (takes participation in society in particular forms) through a process which involves binding individuals from within by satisfying their needs and desires.
Double-consciousness
- W.E.B Du Bois - Double-consciousness (as an american and as a african and the reality as an african american)
- This sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity
- I have a different understanding of my society (american; equal opportunity, freedom, advancement) (when im thinking as an african, im seeing the complete opposite- im unfree, living in a place that is segregated (separation of races)
Threesome that he proposed
Proposing a threesome between knower (the person living it or the social scientist), the act of knowing, and the known - these 3 things - process of the production of society. Society is produced as a result of this relationship in part - society does not exist as something produced external to you but produced by your participation in it
Knowledge doesn’t exist independently in the world, nor only in the mind. It is constructed in the relationship between the person who knows, the act of knowing, and what is known.
Common sense vs Sociological Sense
1) Systematic inquiry → sociology collects data carefully and critically; common sense relies on everyday experience
2) Objectivity → sociology tries to step back from bias and include all perspectives
3) Theory → sociology generalizes and analyzes patterns, building frameworks that go beyond local knowledge (generalisation, analysis, and communication)
What is absent from common sense is the explicit and reflexive combination of generalisation, analysis, and communication in an attempt to understand patterns of human behaviour.
Jenkins pg. 30
Sociology uses:
Responsible speech - dependent on its authority on ration, organization, logical argumentation that appeals to evidence - see the bigger picture
Broad framework - takes a step back, zooms out using responsible speech
Webs of interdependency (think of the cube) to understand indidivuals in terms of these relations
Separate Idea:
- Hegemonic ideas (leadership of one group through influence not coercion) that justify the status quo (common sense) not calling for social change but social stability - sociological sense does the opposite
Sociological theory combines 3 elements (explain them in a sentence)
Value-freedom
Weber argued that scholars must remain relatively free from ideological pressures, cultural prejudices, and political influences at the same time as they free themselves for independent scrutiny of inconvenient facts or conflicting viewpoints.
Not saying they should be neutral
So understand Weber as saying when you are doing sociological analysis, don't justify your hypothesis from your political views alone
Do not justify by only looking at political import of your values, try to understand and analyze the subject you are studying from every angle possible (think of the cube)
Modernity vs Postmodernity
Modernity: A historical era beginning with the Enlightenment and then continuing through the Industrial Revolution and taking us up to the 1950s. It is characterized in the West by industry, prosperity, the growth of cities, organized health care and education, literacy, democracy, the nation state. (Ben Agger).
It ended at Kojeve - what the western world has proves was to show that science can manipulate both people and environment in order to make enormous advances in everyday of your life - yes the science improved our lot but it also produced enormous suffering/it decided it could treat people as things and send them to concentration camps - the value of human life (jews, gays, disbaled people) were exterminated becasue that particularly understanding of the western world view seen they have nothing to contribute in fact, they are the problem
Environmental degradation - western man (the idea that the human being is the absolute lord in the way God was understood) - that era was modernity, what we call capitalism - it created previously unknown suffering in the form of genocide/colonialsim, racism, collogical degredation
Postmodernity - the cultural logic of late capitalism - in other words, how do we keep thinking of this system of capitalism with it economic, political, cultural, and psychological structures - how do we still think about it - we can no longer suggest science is propelling us because it has brought us to this moment of contradiction
A theory of society and culture that maintains that we have moved beyond modernity in that we no longer rely on urban factories and warehouses with vast inventories, class struggle has been muted, belief in progress has weakened, and science has lost the ability to reveal the world’s mysteries. (Ben Agger)
What is vantage point? How do we discover it?
Where you start from what your vantage point is, determines the kind of research you can do.
How to discover the vantage point in sociological research?
Deconstruction is the tendency of all texts to unravel, to come apart at the seams as their glosses, inconsistencies, contradictions and deferrals of meaning eventually get the better of the seamless impression they try to create. (p.446)
That which we see as a whole (the thing that we want to know as seamless - once you start paying attention you see the cracks in it)
- To discover any vantage point are looking at elements of the cube - we are looking at culture
Why do we destructure it? - to recognize it is written from a certain vantage - authors way of how he sees it - Science, even though we treat it as the old testament, trying to remember that all the things we are told has been written by someone as result of research and functions in a very particular way - so therefore we have to authorize science to give it an author and remember the fact that it was “its having-been-written-from-a-certain-vantage”