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Auguste Comte, 1798-1857
E. Among the various forms of science, Comte said that the most important new scientific field was sociology
(he created this term), because the scientific study of society had become possible only in the Positive Age.
1. Comte saw himself as the incarnation of this new scientific sociology, which would explain all the
categories of human social life.
2. As sociologists learned the laws of social development, they would pass on the information to the
government, which would create new laws and policies.
3. Comte’s theory had a strong authoritarian dimension because elite specialists would simply decide what the government should do.
F. Comte’s ideas became popular in France during the authoritarian era of Napoleon III, who thought that science could bring happiness to the masses.
1. Positivism was somewhat like Utilitarianism in stressing the external conditions of happiness without
concern for complex human emotions.
2. The political application of Positivism showed little interest in individual freedom, but the philosophical assumptions became popular among people who made science a kind of new religion.
3. More generally, Positivism stimulated the scholarly development of the modern social sciences and the systematic study of human societies.
List of eponymous laws - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This list of eponymous laws provides links to articles on laws, adages, and other succinct observations or predictions named after a person. In some cases the person named has coined the law — such as Parkinson's law. In others, the work or publications of the individual have led to the law being so named — as is the case with Moore's law. There are also laws ascribed to individuals by others, such as Murphy's law; or given eponymous names despite the absence of the named person.
Moral panic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A moral panic can be defined as "the intensity of feeling expressed by a large number of people about a specific group of people who appear to threaten the social order at a given time."[1] Stanley Cohen, author of the seminal Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1973), says moral panic occurs when "[a] condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests."[2] Those who start the panic when they fear a threat to prevailing social or cultural values, are known by researchers as "moral entrepreneurs", while the people who supposedly threaten the social order are known as a "folk devil." They are byproducts of controversies that produce arguments and social tension, or aren't easily discussed as some of these moral panics are taboo to many people.[3] The media have long operated as agents of moral indignation, even if they are not self-consciously engaged in crusading or muckraking. Simply reporting the facts can be enough to generate concern, anxiety or panic
Spiral of silence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The spiral of silence is a political science and mass communication theory propounded by the German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. The theory asserts that a person is less likely to voice an opinion on a topic if one feels that one is in the minority for fear of reprisal or isolation from the majority (Anderson 1996: 214; Miller 2005: 277).
Jacob Taubes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jacob Taubes (1923, Vienna – March 21, 1987, Berlin) was a sociologist of religion, philosopher, and scholar of Judaism.
Taubes was born into an old rabbinical family. He obtained his doctorate in 1947 for a thesis on "Occidental Eschatology" and initially taught religious studies and Jewish studies in the United States.
From 1965 he was Professor of Jewish Studies and Hermeneutics at the Free University of Berlin. He has influenced many contemporary thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben and Peter Sloterdijk.
Taubes' books include Abendländische Eschatologie (Occidental Eschatology) and The Political Theology of Paul [Stanford UP, 2004].
Leading sociologist talks about emergence of youth groups in Egypt
A leading sociologist who studies Egyptian society revealed in a lecture at AUB that a new Egyptian youth movement is emerging and has been effecting some substantial positive impacts on society.
Daniel Bell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Daniel Bell (born 10 May 1919 in New York) is a sociologist and a professor emeritus at Harvard University. He is also a director of Suntory Foundation and a scholar in residence of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1990, Bell retired as professor of sociology at Harvard University. Currently he lives in Cambridge, MA with his wife Pearl Bell, a literary criticism scholar.
Bell graduated from City College of New York with a B.A. in ancient history in 1939 rather than sociology, at the behest of his academic advisor. He started his career as a journalist, being a managing editor of The New Leader magazine (1941–1945), a labor editor of Fortune (1948–1958) and a co-founder of The Public Interest Magazine (1965). In 1960 Columbia University awarded him with a Ph.D. degree. He taught sociology first at Columbia University (1959–1969) and then at Harvard University. He served as a member of President’s Commission on Technology in 1964–1965 and as member of President’s Commission on a National Agenda for the 1980’s in 1979. Bell was among the original New York Intellectuals, a group of anti-Stalinist left-wing writers.
He is best known for his contributions to post-industrialism. His most influential books are The End of Ideology (1960), The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) and The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973). The End of Ideology and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism appeared on the Times Literary Supplement’s list of the 100 most important books of the second half of the twentieth century. The End of Ideology has been influential in what was called endism. This is the idea that both history and ideology have been reduced to insignificance because Western democratic politics and capitalism have triumphed. At the time, Bell was attacked by political critics, left-wing and otherwise. They claimed that Bell had replaced a sense of reality with theoretical elegance, arguing that he privileged 'endism' more than he did historical accuracy. In his own words, Bell describes himse
Alan Wolfe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alan Wolfe is a political scientist and a sociologist and is currently on the faculty of Boston College and serves as director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Future of American Democracy Foundation[1], a nonprofit, nonpartisan foundation in partnership with Yale University Press and the Yale Center for International and Area Studies[2], "dedicated to research and education aimed at renewing and sustaining the historic vision of American democracy". A contributing editor of The New Republic, The Wilson Quarterly, Commonwealth Magazine, and In Character, Wolfe writes often for those publications as well as for Commonweal, The New York Times, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, and other magazines and newspapers. He served as an advisor to President Bill Clinton in preparation for his 1995 State of the Union Address and has lectured widely at American and European universities. He was ranked #98 in the list of the 500 most cited intellectuals in the 2001 book by Richard Posner titled Public Intellectuals.
Wolfe currently chairs a task force of the American Political Science Association on "Religion and Democracy in the United States." He serves on the advisory boards of Humanity in Action and the Future of American Democracy Foundation and on the president's advisory board of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. He is also a Senior Fellow with the World Policy Institute at the New School University in New York. In the fall of 2004, Professor Wolfe was the George H. W. Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Irving Louis Horowitz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Irving Louis Horowitz is a sociologist, author and college professor who has written and lectured extensively in his field. Horowitz's "sociological biography", Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on a Harlem Childhood was awarded the National Jewish Book Award.
Horowitz was born in New York City on September 25, 1929, to Louis and Esther Tepper Horowitz. He was educated at City College of New York (now City College of the City University of New York, or CUNY), B.S., 1951; Columbia University, New York City, M.A., 1952; and the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Ph.D., 1957.
As the author of more than twenty-five books and editor of numerous other titles, Horowitz has analyzed such diverse topics as the influence of Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church on American politics, the future of book publishing, and politics in Cuba. In 1990, he published his autobiography, rather a brief "sociological biography" than one that is intellectual of intimate. This was "Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on a Harlem Childhood" (London: Jackson Publ., 1990, 104 p.), for which he received the National Jewish Book Award. It is an unromanticized look at growing up as the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants in the streets of predominantly black Harlem, New York City, in the 1930s. Throughout his academic career, Horowitz received many awards, including a special citation from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for his 1957 book, "The Idea of War and Peace in Contemporary Philosophy"; recognition by Time magazine as a leader of a new breed of radical sociologist (January 5, 1970); the Centennial Medallion from St. Peter's College, Jersey City, New Jersey, 1971, for outstanding contribution to a humanistic social science; and a Presidential Outstanding Achievement Award, 1985, from Rutgers University. He is a member of the Carnegie Council, American Association of Publishers, American Political Science Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and past president (1961-1962) of the New
The Power Elite - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Power Elite is an influential book written by the sociologist, C. Wright Mills, in 1956. In it Mills called attention to the interwoven interests of the leaders of the military, corporate, and political elements of society and suggested that the ordinary citizen was a relatively powerless subject of manipulation by those entities.
The structural basis of The Power Elite was that, following World War II, the United States was the leading country in military and economic terms.
The book is something of a counterpart of Mills' 1951 work, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, which examined the growing role of middle managers in American society. While White Collar characterized middle managers as agents of the elite, The Power Elite did not differentiate them from the rest of the non-elite in society.
The Power Elite (1956) describes the relationship between the political, military, and economic elite (people at the pinnacles of these three institutions), noting that these people share a common world view:
* the military metaphysic: a military definition of reality
* possess class identity: recognizing themselves separate and superior to the rest of society
* have interchangeability: they move within and between the three institutional structures and hold interlocking directorates
* cooptation / socialization: socialization of prospective new members is done based on how well they "clone" themselves socially after such elites
These elites in the "big three" institutional orders have an "uneasy" alliance based upon their "community of interests" driven by the "military metaphysic," which has transformed the economy into a 'permanent war economy'.
C. Wright Mills - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Charles Mills (August 28, 1916, Waco, Texas – March 20, 1962, West Nyack, New York) was an American sociologist. Mills is best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination in which he lays out a highly personal view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship. He is also known for studying the structures of power and class in the U.S. in his book The Power Elite. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post-World War II society, and advocated public, political engagement over disinterested observation
David Riesman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
David Riesman (born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, September 22, 1909; died in Binghamton, New York, May 10, 2002), was a United States sociologist, attorney, and educator.
Riesman's 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd, a sociological study of modern conformity, which postulates the existence of the "inner-directed" and "other-directed" personalities. Riesman argues that the character of post WWII American society impels individuals to "other-directedness", the preeminent example being modern suburbia, where individuals seek their neighbors approval and fear being outcast from their community. This lifestyle has a coercive effect, which compels people to abandon "inner-direction" of their lives, and induces them to take on the goals, ideology, likes, and dislikes of their community. Ironically, this creates a tightly grouped crowd of people that is yet incapable of truly fulfilling each other's desire for companionship. The book is considered a landmark study of American character.[1] Riesman was a major public intellectual as well as a sociologist, representing an early example of what sociologists now call "public sociology."
In addition to his many other publications, Riesman was also a noted commentator on American higher education, publishing, with his seminal work, The Academic Revolution co-written with Christopher Jencks. In The Academic Revolution Riesman sums up his position by stating, "If this book has any single message it is that the academic profession increasingly determines the character of undergraduate education in America." In a painstaking and historically thorough treatment of landmark changes in 20th-century American higher education, Riesman repeatedly highlights the role of the "logic of the research university", which focuses upon strict disciplinary research. This internal logic both sets the goals of the research university and produces its future professors, and, Riesman, notes, also has the effect of isolating any patterns of resistance, dashing their chances of success.
Achieved status - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Achieved status is a sociological term denoting a social position that a person acquires on the basis of merit. It reflects personal skills, abilities, and efforts. Examples of achieved status are being an Olympic athlete, being a criminal, or being a college professor. Status is important sociologically because it comes with a set of rights, obligations, behaviors, and duties that people occupying a certain position are expected or encouraged to perform. These expectations are referred to as roles. For instance, the role of a "professor" includes teaching students, answering their questions, being impartial, and dressing appropriately.
Ascribed status - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ascribed status is the social status a person is given from birth or assumes involuntarily later in life. For example, a person born into a wealthy family has a high ascribed status. In contrast, an achieved status is a social position a person takes on voluntarily that reflects personal ability and merit. Also when a person's position in society is fixed (or ascribed to him or her by others) on the basis of family background or genetic inheritance. Racial, ethnic, and religious differences, as well as gender, often serve as the basis for ascribed status. Other people that are born into ascribed status are people born into royalty. Since the child came into the world with their care givers having royal lineage, the child has inherited those royal blood lines as well.
STEPHEN PFOHL
Stephen Pfohl is a Professor of Sociology at Boston College where he teaches courses in social theory, deviance and social control, women's studies, cultural studies, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, criminology and the sociology of art. Stephen received his B.A. from The Catholic University of America (1971), M.A. and Ph.D. (1976) from The Ohio State University, and was completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University (1981-82). His book Predicting Dangerousness: the Social Construction of Psychiatric Reality was published in 1978 by D.C. Heath, while a first edition of Images of Deviance and Social Control: a Sociological History was published by McGraw-Hill in 1985. Professor Pfohl is also the author of numerous articles and chapters on topics ranging from child abuse, criminal violence and mental health policy to critical social theory, poststructuralist sociology and the politics of postmodern culture.
Thomas Scheff
Labeling theory has also been applied to the term "mentally ill". This was first done in 1966 when Thomas Scheff published Being Mentally Ill. Scheff challenged common perceptions of mental illness by claiming that mental illness is manifested solely as a result of societal influence. He argued that society views certain actions as deviant and, in order to come to terms with and understand these actions, often places the label of mental illness on those who exhibit them. Certain expectations are then placed on these individuals and, over time, they unconsciously change their behavior to fulfill them. Criteria for different mental illnesses are not consistently filled by those who are diagnosed with them because all of these people suffer from the same disorder, they are simply fulfilled because the "mentally ill" believe they are supposed to act a certain way so, over time, come to do so.
Thomas J. Scheff is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Being Mentally Ill, Microsociology, Emotions and Violence (with Suzanne Retzinger), Bloody Revenge, and other books and articles. He is a former Chair of the section on the Sociology of Emotions, American Sociological Association, and President of the Pacific Sociological Association. His fields of research are social psychology, emotions, mental illness, and new approaches to integrating theory & method. His current studies concern, forgiveness, solidarity-alienation, and alternative methods of crime control. His most recent book (1997) concerns part/whole analysis, a unified approach to theory and method in the human sciences. He would like to become a generalist, but it is hard to shed bad habits
Scheff’s theory has had many critics, most notably Walter Gove. Gove has cThomas J. Scheff is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Being Mentally Ill, Microsociology, Emotions and Violence (with Suzanne Retzinger), Bloody Revenge, and other books and articles. He
George Herbert Mead - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
George Herbert Mead (February 27, 1863 – April 26, 1931) was an American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of the founders of social psychology. Mead the social psychologist argued the antipositivistic view that the individual is a product of society, the self arising out of social experience as an object of socially symbolic gestures and interactions. Rooted intellectually in Hegelian dialectics, theories of action, and an amended "anti-Watsonian" social behaviourism, Mead’s self was a self of practical and pragmatic intentions.
Labeling theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Originating in sociology and criminology, labeling theory (also known as social reaction theory) focuses on the linguistic tendency of majorities to negatively label minorities or those seen as deviant from norms. The theory is concerned with how the self-identity and behavior of individuals may be determined or influenced by the terms used to describe or classify them, and is associated with the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy and stereotyping. The theory was prominent in the 1960s and 1970s, and some modified versions of the theory have developed. Unwanted descriptors or categorizations (including terms related to deviance, disability or a diagnosis of mental illness) may be rejected on the basis that they are merely "labels", often with attempts to adopt a more constructive language in its place...////
Labeling theory has also been applied to the term "mentally ill". This was first done in 1966 when Thomas Scheff published Being Mentally Ill. Scheff challenged common perceptions of mental illness by claiming that mental illness is manifested solely as a result of societal influence. He argued that society views certain actions as deviant and, in order to come to terms with and understand these actions, often places the label of mental illness on those who exhibit them. Certain expectations are then placed on these individuals and, over time, they unconsciously change their behavior to fulfill them. Criteria for different mental illnesses are not consistently filled by those who are diagnosed with them because all of these people suffer from the same disorder, they are simply fulfilled because the "mentally ill" believe they are supposed to act a certain way so, over time, come to do so.
Social control theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In criminology, Social Control Theory as represented in the work of Travis Hirschi fits into the Positivist School, Neo-Classical School, and, later, Right Realism. It proposes that exploiting the process of socialization and social learning builds self-control and reduces the inclination to indulge in behaviour recognized as antisocial. It was derived from Functionalist theories of crime and Ivan Nye (1958) proposed that there are four types of control:
* Direct: by which punishment is threatened or applied for wrongful behaviour, and compliance is rewarded by parents, family, and authority figures.
* Internal: by which a youth refrains from delinquency through the conscience or superego.
* Indirect: by identification with those who influence behaviour, say because his or her delinquent act might cause pain and disappointment to parents and others with whom he or she has close relationships.
* Control through needs satisfaction, i.e. if all an individual's needs are met, there is no point in criminal activity.
travis hirschi -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia
American criminologist known for his social-control perspective on juvenile delinquency and his self-control perspective on crime. Hirschi received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley (1968), and taught at several universities before joining the faculty of the University of Arizona (1981).
In Causes of Delinquency (1969)—a groundbreaking work that had a profound influence on criminology during the next three decades—Hirschi argued that delinquency can be explained by the absence of social bonds. According to Hirschi, social attachments (e.g., to parents, teachers, and peers), involvement in conventional activities, acceptance of social norms (such as the norm that criminal acts should be avoided), and recognition of the moral validity of law are most likely to prevent delinquency. Hirschi’s collaboration with the American criminologist Michael R. Gottfredson resulted in A General Theory of Crime (1990), which defined crime as “acts of force or fraud undertaken in pursuit of self-interest.” Arguing that all crime can be explained as a combination of criminal opportunity and low self-control, Gottfredson and Hirschi hypothesized that a child’s level of self-control, which is heavily influenced by child-rearing practices, stabilizes by the time he reaches the age of eight. Thus, they identified parenting as the most decisive factor in determining the likelihood that a person will commit crimes. Children reared in settings of neglect or abuse, for example, will be more likely to commit criminal acts, while children raised in supervised homes, where punishment is a consequence of bad behaviour, will be more likely to withstand temptations toward criminal conduct. In addition to criminal and delinquent acts, low self-control is manifested in tendencies to be “impulsive, insensitive, physical, risk-oriented, shortsighted, and nonverbal.” Although Hirschi’s theories were criticized for being, among other things, tautological, paternalistic, and definitionally flawed, they were widely popular
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