Concept
Social theory
Overview
Social theories are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena. A tool used by social scientists, social theories relate to historical debates over the validity and reliability of different methodologies (e.g. positivism and antipositivism), the primacy of either structure or agency, as well as the relationship between contingency and necessity. Social theory in an informal nature, or authorship based outside of academic social and political science, may be referred to as "social criticism" or "social commentary", or "cultural criticism" and may be associated both with formal cultural and literary scholarship, as well as other non-academic or journalistic forms of writing.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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The most universal of the forms in which this difference of method is accustomed to present itself, is the ancient feud between what is called theory, and what is called practice or experience. There are, on social and political questions, two kinds of reasoners: there is one portion who term themselves practical men, and call the others theorists; a title which the latter do not reject, though they by no means…
John Stuart Mill, Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy
States what Social theory is; the author is tied to Social theory in the knowledge graph.
Yet those who know the habits of the continent of Europe are aware how apparently small a motive often outweighs the desire of money getting, even in the operations which have money getting for their direct object. The more highly the science of ethology is cultivated, and the better the diversities of individual and national character are understood, the smaller, probably, will the number of propositions become…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
States what Social theory is; the author is tied to Social theory in the knowledge graph.
In this region of the specific and concrete, men are thrown back upon the crudest empiricism, upon short-sighted opportunism and the matching of brute forces. In theory, the particulars are all neatly disposed of; they come under their appropriate heading and category; they are labelled and go into an orderly pigeon-hole in a systematic filing cabinet, labelled political science or sociology. But in empirical fact…
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy
The author is tied to Social theory in the knowledge graph; names Social theory.
Philosophers who discussed Social theory
- Pierre Bourdieu
- Auguste Comte
- Roberto Mangabeira Unger
- Murray Bookchin
- John Dewey
- Jürgen Habermas
- Slavoj Žižek
- Thomas Sowell
- Max Weber
- Max Horkheimer
- Robert A. Heinlein
- Theodor W. Adorno
- G. A. Cohen
- György Lukács
- Simone de Beauvoir
- Georges Sorel
- Zygmunt Bauman
- Jean Piaget
- James Martineau
- Božidar Debenjak
- Jean-Michel Berthelot
- W. B. Gallie
Related ideas
- Muqaddimah
- Georg Simmel
- History
- French Revolution
- Germany
- Government
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Auguste Comte
- Great Britain
- Philosophy
- Western philosophy
- Immanuel Kant
- Ancient Greek
- Roberto Mangabeira Unger
- Verstehen
- Interdisciplinarity
- John Stuart Mill
- Antipositivism
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Karl Popper
- Karl Marx
- Roland Barthes
- Paradigm
- Adam Ferguson
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of American philosophy.