Understanding the shift from classical sociological theory towards modern sociological theory

Résumé du document

Lemert does not believe that social theory is the privilege of social scientists. He actually argues that everybody can practice it, and come up with some social theory by the simple observation of everyday life. He takes the example of his son at school who tried to understand the mechanisms of authority.

The origins of Social Theory:
The apparition of social theory dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Social theory as we know it appeared in the 18th century, with the Enlightenment. Modernity actually triggered it, as the changes that occurred needed to be explained; one of the first social dichotomies was the difference between modernity and the traditional societies before it. Weber, Durkheim, Simmel and Marx wrote on it. Modern society also needed its citizens to participate, and thus to know how their world actually worked. The first form of social theory was thus comparative, which is no longer true.

Extraits

[...] Although very critical with their society, the classical social theorists (Durkheim, Marx, Weber but also Du Bois or Gilman) were not fully aware of what ordinary people had to say. Poor people did know that they had incentives to keep quiet; if addressed to the wrong authority, their voice would have deepened their misery. The rare time where they published something, they did it under pseudonyms, like Harriet Jacob who published Incidents in the life of a slave girl in 1861 under the name of Linda Brent. [...]

[...] This continued with gay rights, feminism, etc. This was the second golden age of social theory. The young revolutionaries of the 1960's became academics when they needed work, argues Lemert. Then, they produced social theory which was in harmony with their political ideas. The emblematic figures of this new age are Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Derrida founded in 1966 the poststructuralist movement. It mainly focused on language. He proposed an alternative way of thinking. Social theory had to open itself to a world of differences. [...]

[...] Understanding the shift from classical sociological theory towards modern sociological theory Charles Lemert, Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings (1999) Introduction Lemert does not believe that social theory is the privilege of social scientists. He actually argues that everybody can practice it, and come up with some social theory by the simple observation of everyday life. He takes the example of his son at school who tried to understand the mechanisms of authority. The origins of Social Theory The apparition of social theory dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century. [...]

[...] Social theory therefore had to answer the new questions it brought, to explain the mechanisms of the interactions between the different social spheres. Saying It, Reading It, and Getting By Better The focus on language in Derrida's poststructuralist theory can be understood by the fact that language is universal in that it is the only weapon of the weak. The technological improvements of the post 1960's era increased this power, strengthened it, and made it visible. It thus developed into a new kind of social theory. [...]

[...] This led the production of social theory to be more at the contact of everyday life people. The world moved from the enlightenment which advocated a universal humanistic attitude of critical thinking toward a world where the development of different cultures turns into the development of many critical social theories which can all be different from one another. These differences are caused by the different social conditions shaping each culture's reality. The big and recent change in social theory is the end of the dominance of the Western view of the world on social theories. [...]