6 credits| Prof. Daniel Elam
From the mid-nineteenth century, thinkers have attempted to describe the causes, existence, and consequences of collective human activity. What happens when people behave together? We name this collective unit ‘society’ and sociologists claim to study it scientifically. ‘Society’ is not divisible into its individual human components: it is something simultaneously greater than and lesser than the sum of its parts. At the same time, it is impossible to understand any single ‘individual human’ without understanding their position in a collective: pure individuality is impossible. Consequently, this simultaneously self-evident and elusive object of study has produced a philosophically exciting and messy body of work.
Other thinkers, excited and anxious about this unruly unit of human experience, imagined more revolutionary possibilities. If ‘society’ was a fiction that defined collective human experience, could we write new fictions, and consequently, new societies? ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world’, early social theorist Karl Marx wrote in 1845, but ‘the point is to change it.’ Anticolonial, anti-sexist, and anti-racist thinkers tooksociology beyond the walls of the classroom and into the world to turn its implicit political promises into explicit political objectives in a decolonising world. We will closely read the works of leading early social theorists to understand their analyses, insights, interventions, and theoretical contributions on their own terms (and in the context of the intellectual conversations they were engaged with). We will approach sociological texts as driven by certain aesthetic concerns; in this sense we will treat social theory as a genre of literature. Finally, we will understand the implicit political commitments of these sociological texts, and therefore trace the political projects they envision (or enact) in the world they are simultaneously describing.