CiNii Books - Visions of the sociological tradition

In this work, Don Levine moves from the origins of systematic knowledge in ancient Greece to the present day in order to present an account that is at once a history of the social science enterprise and an introduction to the cornerstone works of Western social thought. "Visions" has three meanings, each of which corresponds to a part of the book. In Part 1, Levine presents the ways previous sociologists have rendered accounts of their discipline, as a series of narratives - or "life stories" - that build upon each other, generation to generation, a succession of efforts to envisage a coherent past for the sake of a purposive present. In Part 2, the heart of the book, Levine offers his own narrative, reconnecting centuries of voices into a dialogue among the varied strands of the sociological tradition: Hellenic, British, French, German, Marxian, Italian and American. Here, he tracks the formation of the sociological imagination through a series of conversations across generations. From classic philosophy to pragmatism, Aristotle to W.I. Thomas, Levine maps the web of visionary statements - confrontations and oppositions - from which social science has grown. Throughout each stage, Levine demonstrates how social knowledge has grown in response to three recurring questions: How shall we live? What makes humans moral creatures? How do we understand the world? He anchors the creation of social knowledge to ethical foundations, and shows how differences in those foundations disposed the shapers of modern social science - among them, Marshall and Spencer, Comte and Durkheim, Simmel and Weber, Marx and Mosca, Dewey and Park - to proceed in vastly different ways. In Part 3, Levine offers a vision of the contemporary scene, setting the crisis of fragmentation in social sciences against the fragmentation of experience and community. By reconstructing the history of social thought as a series of fundamentally moral engagements with common themes, he suggests new uses for sociology's intellectual resources: not only as insight about the nature of modernity, but also as a model of mutually respectful communication in an increasingly fractious world.

Table of Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Prologue Pt. 1: Visions of the Past: Six Histories in Search of a Tradition 1: Disciplines and Their Stories 2: Positivist and Pluralist Narratives 3: Synthetic Narratives 4: Humanist and Contextualist Narratives 5: The Changing Need for Narratives Pt. 2: Visions of the Future: Seven Traditions in Search of a Good Society 6: The Hellenic Tradition 7: The British Tradition 8: The French Tradition 9: The German Tradition 10: The Marxian Tradition 11: The Italian Tradition 12: The American Tradition Pt. 3: Visions of the Present: Social Science in Crisis or Transformation? 13: Forming and Transforming a Discipline 14: Diagnoses of Our Time 15: On the Heritage of Sociology 16: In Quest of a Secular Ethic Epilogue: Dialogue as an Antidote to Fragmentation? Appendix A: Selected Dates in the History of Western Social Thought Appendix B: Graphic Depictions of the Six Types of Narrative Appendix C: Basic Postulates of the Seven Traditions References Index

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Visions of the sociological tradition

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