Summary
Contents
Subject index
This book situates sociology in its historical, philosophical and theological contexts and examines how the founders of the discipline developed competing analyses of the processes elementary to social and moral life through their distinctive sociological contributions. Surveying a range of sociological analyses from Comte to feminism, postmodernism and rational choice theory, this book examines the various attempts that have been made to reconstruct the discipline over the last century, and the challenges facing it today. Individual chapters examine `Human Sociology', `Sacred Sociology', `Tragic Sociology', `Heroic Sociology' and `Normative Sociology'. The book moves on to discuss post-classical thought, and the attempted reconstruction o
Rational Sociology
Rational Sociology
Introduction
During the last quarter of the twentieth century much sociology has not only tended to reject the notion that society constitutes an overarching normative order, but has also fragmented into a series of competing, often mutually exclusive visions of social and moral life. A few theories sought to reconceive of ‘society’ and ‘morality’ by establishing new totalising syntheses, but the likes of neo-functionalism were generally seen as adding to the proliferation of sociological perspectives rather than providing a solid basis for the discipline's unification. In this context ‘rational choice theory’ (a theory whose roots lie in eighteenth-century utilitarianism but which re-established itself in the 1950s under the title ‘exchange theory’) developed into a highly influential and radical attempt to reconstruct sociology. The ...
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