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1. Sociology is the youngest of social sciences.
2. Sociological research provides educators, planners, lawmakers, administrators, developers, business leaders.
3. Other social sciences include political science, economics and anthropology, including physical anthropology, and cultural or social anthropology.
4. All sociological research makes use of the scientific method, but the specific techniques of data collection and analysis differ from one sociological study to another.
5. It was Spencer who invented Darwinism and who gave it such a charge that it lasted for at least a half a century and colored the whole of social drought.
6. Thus we consistently regard a society as an entity.
7. Weber's dissertation as well as his post-doctoral work were in legal history.
8. Sombart, in his discussions of the genesis of capitalism has distinguished between the satisfaction of needs and acquisition as the two great leading principles in economic history.
9. The classic organization theory generally studies the formal organizations that have the artificial genesis and does not almost touch upon the organizations of the natural (non-intentional) and combined (natural-artificial) origin, including families, tribes, etc.
10. Every human is born, lives, works and dies in social organizations (family, kinder-garden, school, college, working collective, city, country etc.), that make him obey their laws and the quality of human’s life depends on the humanism of these laws.
11. Kont, Spencer, Durkheim, Sorokin, Parsons examined society as whole social system and they believed, that their followers will continue the system (holos) approach.
12. Frank H. Knight's "no specifically human motive is economic" applies not only to social life in general, but even to economic life itself.
13. The tendency to barter, on which Adam Smith so confidently relied for his picture of primitive man, is not a common tendency of the human being in his economic activities, but a most infrequent one.
14. Within the nations we are witnessing a development under which the economic system ceases to lay down the law to society and the primacy of society over that system is secured.
15. The problem of freedom arises on two different levels: the institutional and the moral or religious.
16. On the institutional level, regulation both extends and restricts freedom; only the balance of the freedoms lost and won is significant.
17. The very possibility of freedom is in question.
18. How does man become mature and able to exist as a human being in a complex society?
19. As Poincare observed a half-century ago, sociologists have long been hierophants of methodology, thus, perhaps, diverting talents and energies from the task of building substantive theory.
20. The economist, the political scientist, and the psychologist have increasingly come to recognize that what they have systematically taken as given, as data, may be sociologically problematical.
21. Durkheim remains to this day, along with Max Weber, one of the two prominent sociologists of religion. What the sacred is in Durkheim's thought, charisma is in large degree in Weber's.
22. Were both men preoccupied by religion and its role in the society?
23. From this common preoccupation has emerged most of the central propositions of the contemporary sociology of religion.
24. From these repeated experiences, he little by little arrives at the idea that each of us has a double, another self, which in determined conditions has the power of leaving the organism where it resides and of going roaming at a distance.
25. Then we have explained nothing of religion until we have found whence this idea comes, to what it corresponds and what can have aroused it in the mind.
26. Later on, we shall have occasion to fix precisely the meaning which this word expresses; for the time being, it will suffice to say that it is the distinctive character of every sacred being.
27. However, there are certain Australian tribes which periodically celebrate rites in honour of fabulous ancestors whom tradition places at the beginning of time.
28. We have seen that Spencer has already contested the reality of this so-called instinct. Since animals clearly distinguish living bodies from dead ones, it seemed to him impossible that man, the heir of the animals, should not have had this same faculty of discernment from the very first.
29. A science is a discipline which, in whatever manner it is conceived, is always applied to some real data. Physics and chemistry are sciences because physico-chemical phenomena are real, and of a reality which does not depend upon the truths which these sciences show. There is a psychological science because there are really consciousnesses which do not hold their right of existence from the psychologist.
30. This doctrine rests, in part, upon a certain number of linguistic postulates which have been and still are very much questioned.
31. But we shall leave aside those questions, the discussion of which requires a special competence as a philologist, and address ourselves directly to the general principles of the system.
32. That men have an interest in knowing the world which surrounds them, and consequently that their reflection should have been applied to it at an early date, is something that everyone will readily admit.
33. Things become nothing less than living and thinking beings, minds or personalities like those which the religious imagination has made into the agents of cosmic phenomena.
34. Every morning the sun mounts in the horizon, every evening it sets; every month the moon goes through the same cycle; the river flows in an uninterrupted manner in its bed; the same seasons periodically bring back the same sensations.
35. During this time, the American tradition continued to develop with an independence which it has kept up until very recent times.
36. The works of Spencer and Gillen especially have exercised a considerable influence, not only because they were the oldest, but also because the facts were there presented in a systematic form, which was of a nature to give a direction to later studies, and to stimulate speculation.
37. Sociology is an extremely variegated discipline. Differences of theoretical outlook and methodology split it into numerous competing traditions and schools of thought.
38. Much of the substance of Parsons's later writings on power consists of a reaffirmation of this position, and an elaboration of the analogy between power and money.
39. Money itself has no intrinsic utility; it has “value” only in so far as it is commonly recognized and accepted as a standard form of exchange. It is only in primitive monetary systems, when money is made of precious, metal, that it comes close to being a commodity in its own right.
40. In the subsequent discussion, my principal interest will be to comment on Parsons's analysis of power as such.
41. There is a great deal of difference between the sort of interpretation of social and historical change which Parsons presents in Societies, and one which follows a Marxist standpoint.
42. But it is an accepted fact of political life that those who occupy formal authority positions are sometimes puppets who have their strings pulled from behind the scenes.
UNIT 2
READING AND SPEAKING
Pre-reading task
1. Agree or disagree with the statement: “A person can live only in the society of other people”.
2. What is “a society” for you?
3. Do you think that a society should be seen as an entity?
4. Read the text.
What is a society
This question has to be asked and answered at the outset. Until we have decided whether or not to regard a society as an entity; and until we have decided whether, if regarded as an entity, a society is to be classed as absolutely unlike all other entities or as like some others; our conception of the subject matter before us remains vague. It may be said that a society is but a collective name for a number of individuals. Carrying the controversy between nominalism and realism into another sphere, a nominalist might affirm that just as there exist only the members of a species, while the species considered apart from them has no existence; so the units of a society alone exist, while the existence of the society is but verbal. Instancing a lecturer's audience as an aggregate which by disappearing at the close of the lecture, proves itself to be not a thing but only a certain arrangement of persons, he night argue that the like holds of the citizens forming a nation.
But without disputing the other steps of his argument, the last step may be denied. The arrangement, temporary in the one case, is lasting in the other; and it is the permanence of the relations among component parts which constitutes the individuality of a whole as distinguished from the individualities of its parts. A coherent mass broken into fragments ceases to be a thing; while, conversely, the stones, bricks, and wood, previously separate, become the thing called a house if connected in fixed ways. Thus we consistently regard a society as an entity, because, though formed of discrete units, a certain concreteness in the aggregate of them is implied by the maintenance, for generations and centuries, of a general likeness of arrangement throughout the area occupied. And it is this trait which yields our idea of a society. For, withholding the name from an ever-changing cluster such as primitive men form, we apply it only where some constancy in the distribution of parts has resulted from settled life.
Regarding a society as a thing, what kind of thing must we call it? It seems totally unlike every object with which our senses acquaint us. Any likeness it may possibly have to other objects, cannot be manifest to perception, but can be discerned only by reason. If the constant relations among its parts make it an entity; the question arises whether these constant relations among its parts are akin to the constant relations among the parts of other entities. Between a society and anything else, the only conceivable resemblance must be one due to parallelism of principle in the arrangement of components. There are two great classes of aggregates with which the social aggregate may be compared-the inorganic and the organic. Are the attributes of a society, considered apart from its living units, in any way like those of a not-living body? or are they in any way like those of a living body? or are they entirely unlike those of both?
The first of these questions needs only to be asked to be answered in the negative. A whole of which the parts are alive, cannot, in its general characters, be like lifeless wholes. The second question, not to be thus promptly answered, is to be answered in the affirmative. The reasons for asserting that the permanent relations among the parts of a society, are analogous to the permanent relations among the parts of a living body, we have now to consider.
Answer the following questions
1. What is a society?
2. What example does the author of the text give to show a society as an entity?
3. What is the only resemblance between a society and other entities?
4. Is a society like a living or not-living body or both?
5. Peter Burger, the author of one of the most popular textbooks of sociology in the world, considers a society as “a net of social roles”. Agree or disagree.
READING AND TRANSLATION
1. Read the text about one of the most influential European thinkers and answer the following questions:
1. Why is I. Kant regarded to be one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe?
2. Name his most important works.
3. What was his suggestion about asking metaphysical questions?
4. What is the main idea of Kant’s works?
5. What compromise did he create between the empiricists and the rationalists?
6. Who was the follower of Kant’s philosophy?
Immanuel Kant
(22 April 1724 - 12 February 1804)
Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe and of the late Enlightenment.
Kant created a new widespread perspective in philosophy which influenced philosophy through to the 21st Century. He also published important works of epistemology, as well as works relevant to religion, law, and history. One of his most prominent works is the Critique of Pure Reason, an investigation into the limitations and structure of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics and epistemology, and highlights Kant's own contribution to these areas. The other main works of his maturity are the Critique of Practical Reason, which concentrates on ethics, and the Critique of Judgment, which investigates aesthetics and teleology.
Pursuing metaphysics involves asking questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Kant suggested that metaphysics can be reformed through epistemology. He suggested that by understanding the sources and limits of human knowledge we can ask fruitful metaphysical questions. He asked if an object can be known to have certain properties prior to the experience of that object. He concluded that all objects about which the mind can think must conform to its manner of thought. Therefore if the mind can think only in terms of causality – which he concluded that it does – then we can know prior to experiencing them that all objects we experience must either be a cause or an effect. However, it follows from this that it is possible that there are objects of such nature which the mind cannot think, and so the principle of causality, for instance, cannot be applied outside of experience: hence we cannot know, for example, whether the world always existed or if it had a cause. And so the grand questions of speculative metaphysics cannot be answered by the human mind, but the sciences are firmly grounded in laws of the mind.
Kant believed himself to be creating a compromise between the empiricists and the rationalists. The empiricists believed that knowledge is acquired through experience alone, but the rationalists maintained that such knowledge is open to Cartesian doubt and that reason alone provides us with knowledge. Kant argues, however, that using reason without applying it to experience will only lead to illusions, while experience will be purely subjective without first being subsumed under pure reason.
Kant’s thought was very influential in Germany during his lifetime, moving philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists. The philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer each saw themselves as correcting and expanding the Kantian system, thus bringing about various forms of German idealism. Kant continues to be a major influence on philosophy, influencing both analytic and continental philosophy.
2. Give Russian equivalents to the proper names:
Königsberg, Prussian, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kantian.
3. Translate the following words and phrases:
the late Enlightenment; widespread perspective; epistemology; limitations and structure of reason; encompass an attack on; maturity; aesthetics and teleology; ultimate nature; prior to; principle of causality; laws of the mind; empiricists and rationalists; Cartesian doubt; analytic and continental philosophy.
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