Theories of Social Order: A Reader

by Christine Horne

Book Overview

Already a standard in its first edition, this newly expanded and reorganized reader provides a compelling exploration of what arguably remains the single most important problem in social theory: the problem of social order. Contending that theory's purpose in the social sciences lies in its ability to explain real-world phenomena, Theories of Social Order presents classic texts alongside contemporary theoretical extensions and recent empirical...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804758735
• ISBN13: 9780804758734
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: Stanford Social Sciences
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.9" x 9.9"

Customer Reviews

Cogent Introduction to an Oxymoron--Sociological Theory

The mark of arrival of a mature field is its possession of a core theoretical structure, agreed upon by all researchers in the field as a starting point for creative experimentation and theory building. Of course, infrequently but virtually inevitably, some parts of the core theory are discredited because of their inability to explain a novel phenomenon, or their incorrect predictions. In a mature field, it does not take long for a single, uniformly accepted, superior explanation, one that can do all the older core theory could do an more, to displace the discredited theory. I am certain that I will be attacked as an antediluvium heretic for affirming the previous paragraph in the face of several decades of the postmodernist critique of science. Yes, I have a deep appreciation for Thomas Kuhn's paradigm concept and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, but the relativist interpretations of these great thinkers are just drivel. I knew Kuhn personally, and heard him lament many times the nefarious and incorrect use to which his Nature of Scientific Revolutions was put by the radical relativists. I am sure Wittgenstein would be equally shocked at the application to his ideas by David Bloor and the "social construction of knowledge" crew or the Critical Theorists. If you want to really understand the scientific method read about Imre Lakatos (one of my intellectual and political heroes---he changed his name to that of a famous Hungarian general who stood up to the Nazi deportation of the Jews when they controlled his native country), whose theory of "research programs" is a creative synthesis of Kuhn, Popper, Duhem, and Marx. I offer this exegesis on a matter seemingly tangential to an undergraduate reader in sociological theory to stress the point that there is no core sociological theory. One learns sociology the way one learns philosophy or art, by learning to appreciate a parade of superstars, each of whom is careful to differentiate his product from all of the others (unless they are long-dead, and hence no real threat to intellectual or artistic supremacy). One learns sociology normally by reading the works of Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, Simmel, Parsons, Marx, Mead, Hobbes, Goffman, and so on. Sociologists do not agree on what any two of these thinkers have in common, much less all of them. In a realistic understanding that sociologists will not teach from this book unless it remained faithful to the pluralistic disarray of the field, yet yearning for a scientific approach to the study of society, the authors decided to organize their material not around the Great Masters, but rather the Great Ideas of sociology. This book is called "Theories..." rather than "Theorists" for this reason, and "Theories..." rather than "Theory..." because they do not want to single out one set of ideas as superior to another set, or even to suggest that there might be "One True Theory" of which the fragments presented in this book are simply important asp