Sociology (core)
Enlightenment and the French Revolution
Comte’s conservative reaction to the enlightenment and his very enlightenment’s ideas of sociology that could explain all the natural laws that govern society
It’s started in the enlightenment period because of Newtons revolutionary way of thinking in physics which inspired philosophers to apply the same scientific method to study human behavior and how they interact with society and vis-versa
By observing the reality you could collect data and analyze that
Comte wanted to use Newtons line of think to find/discover human natural laws
The enlightenment brought about rationality and separated the spiritual from reality
The enlightenment brought about chaos and this puzzled Comte because believed that rationality could bring about order this brought him to conclude that (all theoretical):
Stage 1: the Theological stage when human beings explain things through stories or myths
Stage 2: Theoretical/metaphysical human beings would explains things with theories that were not backed scientifically
Stage 3: The positive/ Scientific stage because people were able to understand things rationally he believed this would bring about order (science backed beliefs)
Comte needed to explain how rationality had somehow brought chaos, he explained this as when society moves from one phase to another they would take elements from the past into the present which would cause tension which would then cause war, revolutions and chaos.
According to Comte once positivism gained total control all upheaval would end (once you understand society in a scientific way order will ensue)
Positive philosophy: can be understood through the history of the course of the human mind. The discovery arises from great fundamental laws, with solid foundation of proof. (Sociology: and empirical founded science).
The first law is that all branches of human knowledge pass through Cotes three stages
In the positive stage, Science still bear some marks of the two previos stages
The individual is an illustration of the general mind
There can be no scientific knowledge than the one that is observed.
The theological stage gave men the indispensable impulse , through the search for answers to inaccessible questions, to incite human mind to progress
The metaphysical makes the transition from the theological to the positive Philosophy possible. It allows the passage from supernatural to natural observation.
Positive philosophy regards all those phenomena subjects to invariable natural laws. Research for first or final causes are vain
The view is reduce the natural laws to the smallest possible number
Any kind of knowledge arrives to the positive stage in proportion to its generality , simplicity and independence of the other departments. Bacon, Descartes and Galileo made the revolution point in science. Social science is the Fifth category ( the most decent on other categories)
Comte was aware that people would not understand his way of thinking so he decided to create his own religion based on science that would be more palatable and this would make it easy for him to explain his line of thinking to the common man
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Why has capitalism developed in the west? He found the reply in the Protestant ethic
The Protestant idea of the elected was seen as what explained the success in labour activities
However, the specific Protestant religious belief that forbid luxuries, brought to the accumulation of capital
In modern societies, the accumulation of capital is embedded in a religious belief According to Weber, the rationalization would bring capitalism to empty the accumulation of capital from the religious and ethical meaning and would transform, the development of activities and accumulation of capital into a sort of sporty a pure mundane passion and would bring to mundane social problems
Du Bois and Race Theory
du Bois has been an intellectual activist like Martineau. He was one of the first Marxist intellectuals in the US
One of his most important work has been “The Philadelphia Negro”, a study of a urban community of black people and he used a variety of methods, but he is best known for being one of the first ethnographers
He has developed the “race idea”, which is that the history of the world defined by the central thought of race, which a like a”veil”, which serves to separate different races, not in non-transparent way, like one that could be provided by the image of wall, but in a way that allows one race to easily see another and by this separate between the two
This also allows the phenomenon on that he call the double consciousness that is seeing and measuring themselves through others
The Souls of Black Folk
Du Bois has focused on the contact between different races through the work “The souls of black folk”
In this book he has considered the reasons for racial inequalities in the domination of the European continent over the othered
He claimed that race contacts happen in three ways
Through proximity in neighborhoods
Through economic relations
Through political relations
Through the exchange of ideas in conferences and conversations an din writings
He claimed that even for the most open-minded in his times, the black peoples always represented a threat, a menace
For black, the color prejudice is their main cause for their social condition and their social condition then becomes a reason for the color prejudice in a vicious cycle.
Canon
Fanon was one of the pioneers of bringing psychology in political analysis. He used ideas and techniques from European psychiatry and deploying them in the analysis of racism and colonialism
He invented in Martinica with Aimée Cesaire, fa on was influenced bu the concept of “negritude” by Aimée Cesaire, and has had a great influence on West Indian and African literature. This literature strives for the recognition of African identity denied by colonialism and slavery
He invented the term ethononational racism as opposed to biological and cultural racism. Racism is seen as a consequence of of political domination through colonialism
In the search for equality, back people try to emulate white culture but they will never accepted as such and therefore they are condemned to subhumans
After the French war in Algeria he became more radical and he believed in revolution as the only way for black people to achieve equality;its with the colonialism culture
Social Cpnstructivism
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman: “ the Social Constrction of reality.”
Influence always interact in socially instituionactionism: society is a product of human design, which in turn influence individuals
Individuals always interact in socially institutionalized ways of organizing collective life (bridge between positivism and non-positivist perspective).
Social change: emerge when the taken for granted institutional routines no longer make sense in particular social context
Opening up for the sociological understanding of an emancipatory view of hi a social angency
*Social constructionism in sociology; social constructivism in IR
Competing universe of meanings
Berger; in modern society competing universes of meaning
The role of religion: Religion provides like minded in ideals who interact together with a symbolic universe of shared beliefs, symbols, and meanings with an overarching scared canopy 1967, which facilities the plausibility of their
Sense and thus enhances their social interruption
Bourdieu and its constructivist structuralism
Bourdieu was concerned with he false opposition between objectivism and subjectivism
Bourdieu focused on practices the out come of the dialectic relationship between structure and actors agency. In this sense he was glue fed by Marxism and neomarxism
Practice are independent on the will of agents
One of Bourdieu’s main concept is the one of habitus a cognitive structure with which people deal with the social world
Hysteresis: habitus that are inappropriate for the context where r one is leaving; ex rural versus city
Foucault
a linguistic: no labels no formal rule model of behaviors, but always more complexities to deal with
He is influenced by phenomenology but he thinks that the subject is not able to give meaning; because of the archeology of knowledge and the genealogy of power
Tw center Al ideas; archeology of knowledge and genealogy of power
Archeology of knowledge: a general system of the formation and transformation of statements. A set of rules that determine the conditions for possibilities for all but there is no particular discourse at any given time
Interested in discourse that seek to establish the truth
Genealogy of power; the relationship between the knowledge and the power and the practices concerned with the regulation of bodies, the government of conduct, and the formation of the self. How people overnight themselves and others through the production of knowledge
He studied madness, what was normal and what wasn’t
He was concerned with he lack of progression in how society treated those who deviated from societal norms, he theorized with times such should progress as society progressed
Power affects knowledge and vice versa