Social Theory

Catalog description

This course focuses primarily on the works of classical social theorists. The theorists include: George Herbert Meade, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber; and secondarily their influences on the works of more contemporary theorists: C. Wright Mills, Shulamith Firestone, Antonio Gramsci, Erving Goffman, Randall Collins, Robert Bellah, Howard Becker, and Pierre Bourdieu. Among the theoretical conceptions examined: culture, religion, the sacred, power, authority, modernization, deviance, bureaucracy, social stratification, social class, status groups, social conflict, and social conceptions of the self.