Summary
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Subject index
`Social theory is a very difficult subject to teach and it is one that students generally find hard to get to grips with. Teaching Yourself Social Theory offers a highly original and comprehensive resource that will be welcomed by students and teachers alike' - Barry Smart, University of Portsmouth `I have no hesitation in recommending Harris' text to students and teachers of social theory' - Sociology This refreshing and accessible text demonstrates how social theory can be made into an intelligible discourse that touches upon key aspects of everyday life. The abstraction and formalism of much contemporary social theory is criticized as unnecessarily `scholastic' for the beginner. The author maintains that the main problems in studying the subject are not intrinsic to social theory, but derive from how the subject is taught as a university discipline. This lively book uses non-specialist terms to introduce more complex themes, and incorporates a Website with questions and reading guides to some of the classic works.
The Turn to Gramsci
The Turn to Gramsci
Oddly enough, the sort of revival of interest in marxism that influenced cultural studies in the 1970s and 1980s barely referred to the specific debates about class discussed in the previous chapter. A vague interest in political ‘activism’ was pursued, but marxist conceptions of social class as the privileged root of cultural politics were simply abandoned. I do not remember much discussion at all, but any arguments that were advanced seemed to borrow pretty uncritically from the ‘decomposition’ views we have seen in the previous chapter.
The supposed origin for the new kind of activism is the wave of student unrest that affected Britain, Europe, Japan and the USA in the late 1960s. It is very difficult to describe ...
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