There is a possibility that I will be teaching a second year core course in social theory (obviously in a sociology department). The course is called “The Development of Social Theory” and the description speaks of covering material from “the Enlightenment” to “Max Weber.” The course, therefore, is more than the traditional “Marx, Weber, Durkheim” that one gets in “classical social theory” undergraduate courses. Were you teaching such a course, what would you included? The course is twenty for weeks long, two hour long lectures, one hour long tutorials per week. There will likely be two in-class exams. That leaves, subtracting introductory and concluding classes and the two devoted to exams, a total of twenty teaching classes, or forty hours of class time.
My personal inclination is to spend the first semester covering Hobbes up to Marx. This means social contract tradition (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau), French Enlightenment (especially Montesquieu), Scottish Enlightenment and political economy (Ferguson, Hume, Smith), German Enlightenment (Kant, Hegel), French positivism (at the very least Comte). I would like to have at least one lecture on “enlightenment, romanticism and modernity” drawing upon the major historical works (Gay, Taylor, etc). In addition to Marx, Weber and Durkheim, which are taken to be the “core” of classical social theory, I would also like to include Nietzsche, Tocqueville, Simmel and, hopefully, some early feminist works.
I also intend to change my syllabus for my “Law and Regulation” class.
5 Comments
Vico! Vico!
You’re likely right about Vico – he’s rarely read and I’m proof of that. Given that it is a twenty-four week lecture class with an expected enrollment of 150, I don’t think I want to venture too far away from what I already know. Unfortunately, that means Vico is to be excluded at this time.
I need recommendations for a few more pages of Hegel, however. So far I am committed to “lordship and bondage” and, most likely, “terror and absolute freedom.” (Although I’m willing to cut the latter.) I need to select a few passages from the Philosophy of Right and, perhaps, from the Lectures on the Philosophy of History
NO! Don’t leave Vico out in the cold!
Vico’s too important to skip over. His was pretty much the first attempt at a science of society. Hobbes, to be sure, put forward what might be called the first modern political philosophy, but Vico went further by laying down principles for pursuing an analysis of society. He pre-empts Comtean positivism (via the verum-factum principle), Hegel (with the conception of “ideal eternal history”), and thus any number of historicisms as well.
If you’re concerned that you don’t know his work well enough, you could always seize this as an opportunity to be challenged and to learn as much as your students do. The first time I taught Vico (albeit as a tutor rather than as lecturer or unit coordinator), I’d never heard of him. It’s just a matter of doing a bit of directed reading. Pick up a copy of Vico: Selected Writings and flick through it. If you’re after a justification of the “New Science” and of the two aforementioned tents, then Books 1 and 2 of “First New Science” are what you want. Otherwise, I’m pretty certain that volume includes a few other useful extracts. For secondary material, check out Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, particularly the paper by H. Stuart Hughes. There are also numerous papers that discuss Vico in relation to other prominent figures (e.g. Marx, Herder, even Levi-Strauss). There’s also a chapter on Vico (the concluding chapter) in Said’s Beginnings: Intention and Method.
Regarding Hegel, it again depends on whether you’re interested in covering the philosophical principles which will ground a philosophy of society, or whether you want sections from that philosophy of society, which will, necessarily, only represent a limited range of particular points from that “social theory”. If you want the former, then, an extract from the intro to The Philosophy of History and/or one from the intro to the Philosophy of Right will suffice. The intro to the latter will give you quite a bit to work with, but it may be worth supplementing with something from the former, insofar as History is such an important component of Hegel’s philosophy and has had much influence on subsequent social thery.
The intro to the Philosophy of History is insanely (as is Hegel’s wont), but it lends itself to breaking at a few points. You could go p.1 to top of p.10 (working with the Dover 1956 edition) to get an overview of existing methods of doing history and a very brief account of Hegel’s “philosophical history”. Or you could go a few pages further (top of p.17) to get a bit more on philosophical history. That passage ends with a list of three considerations relating to that approach that which will be considered in the subsequent pages, and that subsequent section is also very worthwhile, but quite long, going up to top of p.54. Going that extra distance has the benefit, however, of giving an overview of “the shape which the perfect embodiment of Spirit assumes—the State”; i.e. it gives you a summary of what you would get from the body of the Philosophy of Right.
If you don’t want the detailed overview of the philosophy of History, you could just go the first option and then include a few extracts from the Philosophy of Right. Again, the intro. sets out the principles, but it’s all very displaced from social theory if there isn’t some connection to more direct observations about the nature of society, and that’s when the selection gets a bit arbitrary. The problem with Hegel, of course, is that it’s very difficult to extract sections from any of his books, because they amount to stages within a larger philosophical argument. Nevertheless, you might try the section on “Civil Society” (paragraphs 182-256, approx. 30 pages) and the first paragraphs from “The State” (paras 257-9).
Sounds like it’ll be a very interesting course. Wish I could sit in on it.
Rob, sorry for never getting to your comment. It’s been helpful and some of what you say will likely be incorporated into the course. I was wondering about using Hegel’s introduction to the Philosophy of History rather than extracts from the Philosophy of Right or the Phenomenology. If I’m not mistaken, Hackett has an edition containing just the introduction.
I’ll return to the syllabus in a couple weeks – unrelated events have intervened. I’m tempted to change the organization to twelve weeks leading up to Marx, Weber and Durkheim and then the next twelve weeks on the “founding fathers” themselves.
Why not Simmel? I teach a similar course and I would recommend reading Simmel and also Saussure. Why not? They are quite instrumental in later theoretical movements (though Saussure more obviously than Simmel). But I find that Simmel may be fruitful to introduce urban studies and also the all-too-important convergence of German and French thought which comes more overtly with the French reception of Heidegger. Simmel was working a lot with Bergsonian themes: immanence in particular.
See Charles Lemert’s new book Thinking the Unthinkable that is a wonderful introduction and explication of classical social theories, though it does begin with Marx.
Post a Comment