SJE3904H
This course will explore some of the 'classical' questions and arguments in sociological theory, and some of the authors who provided definitions and disagreements that have shaped sociology as a discipline. The course concentrates upon and questions the foundations of sociology and its early institutionalization in Europe and the United States between 1850-1935. We will read and discuss how classical sociology in different ways attempted to illuminate, understand and (for some) contribute to changing key features of social relations of emergent modernity. Finally, we will read reflexively to trace the various strategies that sociologists have used to know and represent the social and to claim scientific authority for sociological representations. What is it, if anything, that marks sociological knowledge as different from (and superior to?) everyday or common sense knowledge of the social? In addition to reading works by and about 'founding fathers' Marx, Weber and Durkheim, the course will also reflect on the contributions of Simmel, DuBois and Freud to sociology.