Description
Book SynopsisWhat do we mean by the word “social?” In The Centrality of Sociality, scholars respond to themes of The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Social Sciences and Humanities in dialogue with Michael E. Brown.
The Centrality of Sociality provides analyses of important distinctions between individual and society, agency-dependent and agency-independent objectivity, subject and object, theory and theorizing, and action and “course of activity.” Apart from its theoretical interest, the book raises questions about the compelling idea that “the individual is the ultimate referent of moral discourse,” formulating the question “what is human about human affairs” in such a way that the difficulties involved in defining the word individual appear to place in jeopardy the idea of the individual. The chapters analyze themes such as the conceptualization of the social vis-a-vis the individual, theories of action, and notions of subject-object relations.
A thought-provoking collection of research, this edited volume is key reading for scholars and researchers in sociology.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: What is Human about Human Affairs?; Jeffrey A. Halley and Harry F. Dahms
Chapter 1. Consciousness and Crisis: Durkheim, Marx, Spinoza and Revolutionary vs Reactionary Spirit Today; Roslyn Wallach Bologh
Chapter 2. The Uncertainties of the Social; Jean-Louis Fabiani
Chapter 3. Brown on Sociality and the Social; Peter K. Manning
Chapter 4. Brown’s “The Course of Activity”: Non-Repeatability, the Avant-garde, and Temporality; Jeffrey A. Halley
Chapter 5. The Concept of Sociality in the Literary Criticism of Georg Lukács, Lucien Goldmann and Theodor W. Adorno; Daglind E. Sonolet
Chapter 6. In Defense of the Social: Convergences and Divergences between the Humanities and Social Sciences in the United States; Harry F. Dahms
Chapter 7. The Ontology of the Social as a Theory of Social Forms; Michael J. Thompson
Chapter 8. Other Voices: The Concept of Heteroglossia in Michael E. Brown’s Concept of the Social in Uniting the Humanities and Social Sciences; Allen Dunn
Chapter 9. Conceptual Implications in Social Sciences for Inquiring into the Social. Insights from Michael E. Brown’s The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Social Sciences and Humanities; Ilaria Riccioni
Chapter 10. Theorizing, Bounded Rationality, and Expertise: Cognitive Sociology and the Quasi-Realism of Problem-Solving as a Course of Activity; Michael W. Raphael
Chapter 11. Response: What Is Distinctively Human About Human Affairs: Sociality and the Question of Society; Michael E. Brown.
