This course provides an overview of four major thinkers in classical sociological theory - Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Mead. Scholars create sociological theories in response to desires to understand their worlds and often with the hope of creating a better world through such understandings. We will examine the works of Marx, Weber and Durkheim in this light. Writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they sought to understand the causes and consequences, both to the individual and to social organization, of the large-scale social changes that accompanied modernity. In this course, a number of common themes found in the works of these scholars will be examined. We look at their assumptions and claims about social order and disorder. We explore their understandings of the systematic way in which social factors influences the individual, for good or ill. The course also reviews their understandings of social change and history. We study their competing understandings of the proper methods to be used in sociology, both in the development of theory and in the application of research. The course ends with an examination of the works of Mead, the only American theorist to be covered this semester. Mead was a social philosopher whose thinking has been embraced by many micro-sociologists, i.e. sociologists who focus upon lived interpersonal interactions. In contrast to the other theorists studied this semester who focus upon the overall organization of society, Mead attempts to understand social life by examining the individual self and his or her interactions with others.

Required Texts

Emile Durkheim, Division of Labor

Robert Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

George Herbert Mead, George Herbert Mead: On Social Psychology (Anselm Strauss, editor)

Ian McIntosh. Classical Sociological Theory: A Reader

There are also required readings on reserve in the library.

DEPARTMENT NEWS

KATZ JOINS DEPARTMENT

C. WRIGHT MILLS AWARD APPLICATION 07-08