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• Soc 101: History of Sociological Theory [Living Theory] >lecture audio
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• I have been teaching “The History of Sociological Theory” since I arrived in Berkeley in 1976. Neil Smelser, then chair of the sociology department, took quite a gamble in asking me to fill a hole in the course offerings that year. I was no theorist by any stretch of the imagination, having received Bs and Cs for my theory papers in graduate school. It became a case of a course teaching the teacher rather than the teacher teaching the course. But I soon became an unapologetic enthusiast for social theory, aided by two Berkeley golden gifts: first, the willingness of undergraduates -- undaunted by numbers that can rise to over 200 per course or by their dazzling diversity -- to enter into disciplined dialogue with me and with one another; and, second, the devotion of generations of brilliant and dedicated graduate student teachers. The combination was and is electric.
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• In the beginning the course was but a single quarter long but in 1980, in response to popular demand, we converted it to a two-quarter course and when, in 1984 we moved over to the semester system, it became a year-long course. Since then it has become the mainstay and distinctive mark of the Berkeley undergraduate degree, and we now even offer a non-required third semester of social theory for addicts.
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• What is social theory? I have likened it to a map of the social world. Maps simplify the world -- they tell us how to get to where we are going, they serve different purposes. So the same with social theories. They too are simplifications, telling us where we might go, pointing to dangerous or forbidden territory, raising very differermnt questions about the social world. I have also likened social theory to a lens without which we cannot see society. We all share social maps, we all wear lenses. That's what makes us members of society. We are, therefore, like it or not, all social theorists. Sociological theory, however, is a special type of social theory. It sees the world as a problem, a world that is less than perfect, a world that could be different. Sociological theory questions what we take for granted. It challenges common sense, showing the partiality of its truth, how in our daily lives we misrecognize what we are up to. Under the spell of sociological theory common sense, from being something natural and inevitable, becomes something socially constructed (and durably so), but also artificial and arbitrary. In this sense sociological theory is always critical theory. For that reason sociological theory is unsettling and subversive, but it also potentially liberates us from the eternal present.
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• Soc 101A: History of Social Theory (Fall, 1999)
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• A course on the history of social theory can be presented with two different emphases -- as intellectual history or as theoretical tradition. In the first approach the classics are examined in relation to their political, social, economic and particularly their cultural context. In the second approach the classics are systematically compared to one another to show both similarities and differences but also to place them in some developmental sequence. In this course we shall primarily follow the second approach although it will still be essential to situate the ideas of any given writer in his or her historical milieu.
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• It is the hypothesis of this course that within our field there are essentially three theoretical traditions: a marxist tradition, a sociological tradition and an emergent post-modern tradition. In this view sociology developed out of a critical dialogue with the writings of Marx and Engels and the Marxists that followed them, while post-modernism seeks to go beyond the modernism of both marxism and sociology. Accordingly, in the first semester we shall examine the Marxist tradition, beginning with Marx and Engels, passing rapidly through German Marxism (Kautsky, Bernstein, Luxemburg), stopping at Russian Marxism to study Lenin's treatise on the transition from capitalism to communism, moving on to the foremost "Western Marxist" -- Antonio Gramsci -- and from there dealing with Third World Marxism as represented by Frantz Fanon. Next semester we will work through key representatives of the sociological tradition, Durkheim and Weber, followed by Foucault, our postmodern thinker, before ending with the feminism of Simone De Beauvoir.
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• To lend some focus to the discussion and to provide a criterion of selection from the voluminous works of classical theory we shall take a theme that concerned each one of them and threads through their works. That theme is the division of labor. This semester we begin with the formulations of Adam Smith and proceed to show how Marx and Engels moved beyond Smith and how their theories in turn were superceded by Lenin, Gramsci and Fanon. Next semester we examine different criticisms of Smith, namely how Durkheim, Weber and Foucault as well as De Beauvoir incorporate culture, ideology and politics within an expanded notion of the division of labor.
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• Soc 101B: History of Social Theory (Spring, 2000)
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• This is the second semester of our two semester course devoted to the history of social theory. Last semester we studied the development of Marxism beginning with the writings of Marx and Engels followed by Lenin, Gramsci and Fanon. This semester we will study various critical responses to Marxism, beginning with Durkheim and Weber, and then moving on to contemporary theorists, namely Foucault, De Beauvoir, and MacKinnon. Although the critique of Marx and Marxism has loomed large in sociological theory, we can also construct a dialogue among Durkheim, Weber, Foucault and feminism. Thus, we will see how Weber can be viewed as a response to Durkheim, how Foucault combines and moves beyond both of these and how feminism, assimilates, rejects and moves beyond the entire sociological canon.
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• As last semester, we will study our theorists through the lens of the division of labor and the inspiration this gives to their different conceptions of history. We will see how the major historical divide is not, as it was for Marxism, between a communist future and a pre-communist past, but between "modern," "rational-legal," "industrial" and "disciplinary" society on the one side and "traditional," "patrimonial," "feudal," and "repressive" society on the other. The communist future is denied in different ways. The optimistic Durkheim argues that "socialism," or something like it, is almost already with us whereas the pessimistic Weber argues that "communism" can only lead to deeper bureaucratization. Foucault goes even further to dismiss conceptions of any utopian future as dangerous while feminists naturally ask what happens to male domination in this classless utopia.
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• For each theorist "the division of labor" signifies something different. Where Marxism examined the consequences of the division of labor for "class", Durkheim is interested in the relationship of the division of labor to "solidarity," Weber its relation to "rationalization," Foucault its relation to "power," and feminism its relation to "gender." To gain insight into each theorist we will continue to ask about the form, origins, conditions of existence, mechanisms of development and future of the division of labor. In the process we will see which collective identities each theorist recognizes and we will also examine how each understands the relation of the division of labor to "individuality" and "individualism." We will pay particular attention to where the "individual" comes from, how "it" is produced, how "it" is fitted into the division of labor and with what consequences.
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• Soc 101C: C. Wright Mills and American Social Theory (Spring, 2007)
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• Sociology 101A-B, if you took it with me, was largely devoted to European social theory. Whoever your instructor was, the course always included a reading of those three European theorists: Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, plus whomever else the instructor fancied. The United States of America, however, has its own tradition of social theory that has inspired US domination of world sociology since World War Two. Undoubtedly the major figure in this global hegemony is Talcott Parsons who produced the rightly celebrated The Structure of Social Action (1937) -- a grand synthesis of the writings of Weber, Durkheim, the Italian theorist, Pareto, and the English economist Marshall. From this great book Parsons and his students elaborated a body of theory known as structural functionalism that influenced virtually all sociological theory (positively or negatively) in the first two decades after WWII. They founded what came to be known as modernization theory in which US society was the model to be celebrated and emulated by the rest of the world. Alongside and in parallel with this tradition of grand theorizing there arose a powerful empirical research tradition, tied to the development of survey research and statistical methods, to buttress sociology’s claim to science. Trying to bridge the two in what he called “middle range theory,” Robert Merton wrote his brilliant essays contained in Social Theory and Social Structure (1949).
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• C Wright Mills (1916-1962) is the counterpoint to Merton. Like Merton, Mills, too, is firmly located in the tradition of American social theory but not as a peacemaker but as a hostile critic both of structural functionalism, or what he called “grand theory,” and of sophisticated quantitative research, or what he called “abstracted empiricism.” His critical theory is most famously presented in The Sociological Imagination (1959) and laid the foundation for a new body of social theory – a body of social theory he did not live to see but which included the Marxism and feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. Pointing the way forward to a new canon, which included the works of Marx and Engels as well as Weber, and Durkheim, he wrote three classic monographs. The first, The New Men of Power (1948) dealt with the working class and trade unions; the second White Collar (1951) dealt with the new middle class and their intellectuals; and the third, The Power Elite (1956) dealt with the ruling class and its representatives. His critical assessment of US society harked back to that other great sociological critic of US society, Thorstein Veblen, author of The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) just as it foreshadowed the rise of the New Left.
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• It is now half century since Mills wrote his four classics. He has inspired generations of sociologists. We will read his trilogy with a view to assessing their contribution to social theory on the one side and for the light they cast on the contemporary world of the United States on the other. We begin, however, with The Sociological Imagination, his most famous and most widely read book, before turning to the tradition of social theory from which he sprung and to which he reacted. Here we will read selections from the works of Veblen, Parsons and Merton. We then turn to Mills’s three major monographs and we will end with his last book, Listen Yankee (1960), written in the voice of the Cuban Revolution. His asessment of Marxism appeared posthumously in The Marxists but we will not be reading it.
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• Soc 101C: The Theory of Pedagogy (Fall, 2009)
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• Those who took the history of social theory (101A-B) with me will recall that we ended with feminist theory and the problematization of the sociologist’s place in society. For 8 months we explored the different visions of society that Marxism and sociology offer on the presumption that society was something we observe from the outside, something external to the theorist. By showing the partiality of these sociological perspectives feminism suggested that they were manufactured from a particular place within society, a place of male privilege and dominance. A feminist sociology, therefore, would turn social theory upside down in providing an alternative vision of the world from the standpoint of women. Later the same trick would be played on feminism from the stand point of race and sexuality. After feminism there can be no neutral hide-out for the sociologist who is now implicated in the world he or she seeks to comprehend. This course pursues the implications of the sociologist being part of the world he or she studies.
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• If the sociologist can no longer be the “objective” outsider, the “scientist,” then who is he or she? In this seminar we explore the idea of the sociologist as “teacher.” Just as the iconic location of science is the laboratory, the classical location of the teacher is the classroom (the lecture hall, the seminar room, the crèche, etc.). It’s an enclosed space in which the teacher has a captive audience. Just as there are many ways to think about “scientists” and their relation to their “objects” of study even within the framework of the laboratory, so there are many ways to think about teachers and their relation to students. One crucial dimension is the degree to which teachers are viewed as having a monopoly of knowledge and insight, and to what extent students are viewed as empty vessels to be filled or carriers of significant lived experience to be elaborated.
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• This is the conventional terrain of pedagogy and we will be continually referring to it in our discussions, but we shall also ask what happens when we leave the ordered sphere of the classroom and think of society as a classroom. Sociologists become educators in the wider world while various “publics” become their students. This is, indeed, the realm of “public sociology.” What can we learn about “public sociology” by thinking about the classroom, and what can we learn about the classroom from thinking about public sociology? What is the relation between “teaching in the classroom” and “public sociology in society”? For example, if sociologists have a captive audience in the classroom, they have to compete with other “teachers” in the public sphere.
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• Sociology 185: Sociology Live! [video] [article] (Spring, 2011)
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• Classical sociology has conventionally been trapped within the framework of the nation-state. Today we have to think globally but without denying the importance of the national container. As a first step this means comparing different countries, but the more important step is to try to see the world as a unit unto itself, populated by organizations, networks and movements that transcend national boundaries.
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• How shall we construct such a global sociology? This course is based on the premise that sociology takes the standpoint of civil society (Gramsci), and that civil society emerged in the 19th century in response to the destructive expansion of markets (Polanyi). Today, the capitalist economy assumes a global character, much of which is outside the control of nation states. Its destructiveness equally transcends national boundaries as we see in such phenomena as financial crises, global warming and human trafficking. In contesting this destructiveness civil society must also transcend national boundaries as it does, potentially, in social movements, NGOs, and religion. We will use Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism to frame the three parts of the course: the global expansion of capitalism; the global logic of states; and global counter-movements.
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• The development of a global sociology requires not only a theory of global proportions, but a community of sociologists of a global scale, observing and analyzing the world from different places. Therefore, the course calls upon distinguished sociologists from around the world to discuss such contemporary issues as natural resource extraction, terrorism, development projects like microfinance, human rights, labor movements, and so forth.
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• Sociology 202b: Antonio Gramsci and His Legacy (Spring, 2001)
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• What is the relation between Marxism and Sociology? Alvin Gouldner referred to them as Siamese twins, the one dependent upon the other, yet each representing its own tradition of social thought. Thus, one of sociology’s raison d’etres has been the refutation of Marxism, specifically the claim of an emancipatory life beyond capitalism. Think of the writings of Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, and Parsons all of which sought to dismiss or refute the possibility of a world freer or fairer than capitalism. From the other side, Perry Anderson has argued that following the defeat of socialism, whether by fascism or Stalinism, there emerged a distinctive “Western Marxism,” which defined itself by its critique of bourgeois thought, especially in the realm of philosophy but also of sociology. Gramsci, perhaps the greatest of Western Marxists, engaged the vision of the great Italian Hegelian philosopher Croce but he also tangled with sociology. As we will see, we may think of Gramsci as Marxism’s sociologist.
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• Writing in the euphoric times of the early 1970s, Anderson was critical of Western Marxism for having lost its bearings. Its critical energies had become so focused on bourgeois thought that it had lost touch with the working class. Anderson proposed the renewal of an independent, Trotsky-inspired, Marxist tradition. This came to very little. Today, Marxism has once more entered a period of defeat. It cannot draw inspiration from burgeoning socialist (let alone revolutionary!) movements, but instead must rely on a hostile reengagement with bourgeois thought, not least sociology. Of course, the engagement of Marxism and sociology can occur from either side. On the one hand, there is what we might call a Marxist Sociology, the appropriation of Marxist ideas, concepts, method to enrich sociology. Perhaps trying to keep up with the radicalization of sociology in the 1960s and 1970s, in 1981 Seymour Martin Lipset referred to his classic Political Man as a work of “apolitical Marxism” – from a Marxist point of view an oxymoronic travesty. This is bringing Marxism into the orbit of sociology. There has been quite a bit of that in recent years – the enrichment of sociology and the domestication of Marxism. In this course we are more interested in a borrowing that proceeds in the other direction, injecting and thereby enriching Marxism with sociology, producing what we might call a Sociological Marxism.
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• Gramsci is the “Sociological Marxist” par excellence, although, as we will see, others have often turned his writings into a form of Marxist sociology. The thesis of this course is that Gramsci’s work originates in a recognition of the historic significance of sociology as the social science of advanced capitalism. By advanced capitalism – interestingly he never actually gave it a name -- Gramsci meant (a) the expansion of civil society, a social world between economy and state, (b) the expansion of the state itself and (c) the intensification of ties between the two. Sociology was the study, first and foremost of this burgeoning civil society – sociology of family, sociology of education, 2 political sociology, organizational sociology, economic sociology, organizational sociology. Unlike other Marxists, but like sociology, Gramsci appreciated the liberative potential of civil society. But he was critical of sociology for misrecognizing its object in two ways. First, sociology saw civil society (family, associations, parties, education, etc.) as an actually rather than potentially autonomous realm. Sociology colluded in obscuring civil society’s close ties to the state, and thus to the reproduction of capitalism. Second, and relatedly, sociology regarded civil society as a source of spontaneous consensus. Gramsci, by contrast, argued that what he called consent was neither primordial nor given, but organized and protected by the “armor of coercion”. In other words, just as state and civil society were inseparable so were force and consent, even when (or particularly when) force was invisible.
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• Sociology 271A: Methodology of the Social Sciences (FALL, 1991)
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• One question frames this course: To what extent and in what ways is the study of society different from the study of nature? Is sociology a science? In this way we will study the nature of sociology.
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• We begin by studying the meaning of science, the demarcation between science and nonscience, science and mythology, science and ideology, science and pseudo-science. since the war this distinction has become harder to make as the philosophy of science has shifted from the study of logical structures of science to the history of science, that is from science as it might or should be to science as is it really is.
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• All too often both the defenders and critics of sociology-as-science operate with outdated notions of the nature of science. So what the defenders of sociology-as-science consider to be a science is no longer understood to govern even the "true" or paradigmatic sciences, such as physics, from which the model is borrowed. Equally, the hermeneutic critiques of sociology-as-science, which insist that the study of the social world cannot be conducted along lines appropriate to the natural world, miss the convergence between the newer concepts of science and hermeneutic principles. Indeed, it could be argued that the distinction is no longer between the natural and human sciences but between positivist and hermeneutic perspectives within both. In other words, what distinguishes different forms of knowledge is not the object of knowledge (natural world versus social world) but the interests of the knowing person in objectivist (positivist) or subjectivist (interpretive) methodologies.
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• Sociology 272e: Participant Observation (Fall, 1994)
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• In the natural science model, or more precisely in the "positivist" model for the study of the social world the relation between observer and participant is a contamination, a source of bias. In this view, social science is best conducted at a distance. Accordingly, the observer is separated from the participant--a separation fostered by professionalization, and by the way the university insulates its members from the surrounding world. In participant observation the observer breaks out of the shelter and joins the participants in their everyday lives. This can lead to a different picture of social research. Problems that are otherwise repressed or bracketed now become central.
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• Participant observation brings home forcibly what is true of all social research, namely our relationship to those we study is not like the relationship of natural scientists to their objects of study. Our social theory is designed to explain the behavior of others but it reflects back on ourselves, who we are and what interests we have. However mediated the connection to our "subjects", we are all -- whether we bury ourselves in archives, conduct experiments on small groups, analyze surveys or censuses, or pose as an assembly line worker -- real or virtual participants in the world we study, so that "participant observation" can be considered the prototype of all social research. The political, ethical, methodological and theoretical dilemmas of all social research are most acutely experienced in the technique we call participant observation.
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• By emphasizing the relationship between participant and observer, "post-modernism" substitutes an interpretative analysis for explanatory theory. It is said that we neither can nor should do any better than develop an understanding of others and/or of ourselves. Explanatory theory is either impossible or immoral. Science's claim to universalism is a sham. It is one of many discourses without any privileged position. This is too easy a solution. Just as the interlacing of theory and interest lurks beneath the surface of positivism so post-modern ethnography is shot through with unexplicated, unjustified, arbitrary causal claims and explanatory theories. The rhetoric of anti-science makes a virtue out of bad science.
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• Sociology 280c: Introduction to Political Sociology
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• Political sociology lies at the intersection of the politics of sociology and the sociology of politics. In this introductory course we trace the changing parameters of this intersection in three successive periods since the Second World War.
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• Our narrative of the politics of sociology begins with the political sociology of the 1950s which presented itself as an alternative to and a critique of Marxism. Typically, it defended liberal democracy against communist (and fascist) totalitarianism. This era of self-confidence and cold war prompted critiques from an emerging new left, encouraged by the relaxation both of Stalinism abroad and of anti-communism at home. Marxism experienced a revival, particularly in the academy. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a burgeoning civil rights movement and anti-war protest. Even though they were not proletarian in character, these social movements were often inspired by Marxism. They exuded an optimism of a better world, even if they reminded many conservatives of the precursors to fascism. Marxism's developing theoretical framework focused on the inequities and internal contradictions of capitalism, concealed and reproduced by liberal democracy. However, equally hostile to Soviet communism as it was to advanced capitalism, Marxism ultimately failed to provide a convincing alternative to capitalist democracy. Declining social movements and the renaissance of conservative politics in the 1980s brought about a change in orientation. The study of politics sought to go beyond both earlier political sociology and Marxism -- in the end by identifying both as utopian (modernist?) projects. On the Right, just as on the Left, this was a period of growing uncertainty about the capacity of liberal democracy to cope with the deepening economic problems of capitalism. The temporary exuberance created by the collapse of Soviet Communism evaporated as capitalism would now have to stand on its own feet, bereft of a self-justificatory antichrist.
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• This narrative establishes the basis for studying three historic turns in the sociology of politics, dividing the course into four parts. Part I deals with Marxism beyond classical Marxism, focusing particularly on Gramsci's, Prison Notebooks, as the locus classicus of a Marxist theory of politics. His prison writings represent an unnoticed anticipation of the themes of political sociology. Thus, in these first three weeks, we show that Marxism is not the monolithic, ideological bloc of thought caricatured by political sociology. In Part II we study postwar political sociology as a response to the writings of Marx and ask how they differ from and go beyond Gramsci. Part III deals with Marxist responses of the 1960s and 1970s and asks how different they are from or go beyond the political sociology they sought to replace. In Part IV, we study the fragmentation of the field in the 1980s as a reaction against both political sociology and Marxism.
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