Translate the text about Ferdinand Toennies into Russian.

READING AND SUMMARIZING

Read an extract from “Community and Society” by Ferdinand Tonnies and do the tasks that follow.

FERDINAND TONNIES

The People (Volkstum) and the State (Staatstum)

(1) In the same way as the individual natural will evolves into pure thinking and rational will, which tends to dissolve and subjugate its predecessors, the original collective forms of Gemeinschaft have developed into Gesellschaft and the rational will of the Gesellschaft. In the course of history, folk culture has given rise to the civilization of the state.

(2) The main features of this process can be described in the following way. The anonymous mass of the people is the original and dominating power which creates the houses, the villages, and the towns of the country. From it, too, spring the powerful and self-determined individuals of many different kinds: princes, feudal lords, knights, as well as priests, artists, scholars. As long as their economic condition is determined by the people as a whole, all their social control is conditioned by the will and power of the people. Their union on a national scale, which alone could make them dominant as a group, is dependent on economic conditions. And their real and essential control is economic control, which before them and with them and partly against them the merchants attain by harnessing the labor force of the nation. Such economic control is achieved in many forms, the highest of which is planned capitalist production or large-scale industry. It is through the merchants that the technical conditions for the national union of independent individuals and for capitalistic production are created. This merchant class is by nature, and mostly also by origin, international as well as national and urban, i.e., it belongs to Gesellschaft, not Gemeinschaft. Later all social groups and dignitaries and, at least in tendency, the whole people acquire the characteristics of the Gesellschaft.

(3) Men change their temperaments with the place and conditions of their daily life, which becomes hasty and changeable through restless striving. Simultaneously, along with this revolution in the social order, there takes place a gradual change of the law, in meaning as well as in form. The contract as such becomes the basis of the entire system, and rational will of Gesellschaft, formed by its interests, combines with authoritative will of the state to create, maintain and change the legal system. According to this conception, the law can and may completely change the Gesellschaft in line with its own discrimination and purpose; changes which, however, will be in the interest of the Gesellschaft, making for usefulness and efficiency. The state frees itself more and more from the traditions and customs of the past and the belief in their importance. Thus, the forms of law change from a product of the folkways and mores and the law of custom into a purely legalistic law, a product of policy. The state and its departments and the individuals are the only remaining agents, instead of numerous and manifold fellowships, communities, and commonwealths which have grown up organically. The characters of the people, which were influenced and determined by these previously existing institutions, undergo new changes in adaptation to new and arbitrary legal constructions. These earlier institutions lose the firm hold which folkways, mores, and the conviction of their infallibility gave to them.

(4) Finally, as a consequence of these changes and in turn reacting upon them, a complete reversal of intellectual life takes place. While originally rooted entirely in the imagination, it now becomes dependent upon thinking. Previously, all was centered around the belief in invisible beings, spirits and gods; now it is focalized on the insight into visible nature. Religion, which is rooted in folk life or at least closely related to it, must cede supremacy to science, which derives from and corresponds to consciousness. Such consciousness is a product of leaning and culture and, therefore, remote from the people. Religion has an immediate contact and is moral in its nature because it is most deeply related to the physical-spiritual link which connects the generations of men. Science receives its moral meaning only from an observation of the laws of social life, which leads it to derive rules for an arbitrary and reasonable order of social organization. The intellectual attitude of the individual becomes gradually less and less influenced by religion and more and more influenced by science.

Tasks

1. Read the text and find the passages that deal with:

- The process of developing of Gemeinschaft into Gesellschaft;

- The changes that take part in the society;

- Thinking as the main consequence of the changes.

2. Present the information on the process of civilization of the state. Begin with:

The author considers the process of civilization as …

He emphasizes that …

3. Present the information on the new changes in the conditions of adaptation. Use the phrases:

The text gives a detailed description of …

Attention is also given to …

4. Summarize the content of the text.

SPEAKING

Results and conclusion of the current research

Vocabulary to use

comprehensive/ extensive

detailed

results/ data/ evidence

remarkable/ convincing

preliminary

sufficient/ insufficient

to collect/ to obtain/ to get/ to receive data

to treat/ to deal with the problem

to make progress in/ to succeed in

to fail (in)

to coincide

to agree with/ to fit the assumption

to support/ to provide support/ in support of

to come to an understanding

to conclude

to come to/ to make conclusions

Answer the questions:

1. Have you already received any research results?

2. What are the main results of your current research?

3. Have you succeeded in obtaining extensive data?

4. Do your results coincide with the theory you follow?

5. Are the results of purely theoretical or practical interest?

6. Are the data you have collected sufficient to formulate your final conclusions?

7. What part of your research remains still unfinished?

8. What conclusions have you come to?

9. How long will it take you to finish your research?

Speak about the results of your research and conclusions you have made.

Work in pairs: ask for and give information about the results and conclusions of your current research.

GRAMMAR NOTES

Infinitive and Gerund

(на примере правильного глагола study)

Infinitive

	Active	Passive
Simple	to study	to be studied
Progressive	to be studying
Perfect	to have studied	to have been studied
Perfect Progressive	to have been studying

Gerund

	Active	Passive
Simple	studying	being studied
Perfect	having studied	having been studied

Read the sentences from sociological texts, underline the Infinitives and Gerunds. Translate the sentences into Russian.

1. The social organizations are united by some common features, that let talking about their common origin and common laws of functioning and development.

2. The social administration must be observed more widely.

3. Taking into account that the existing social organizations are far from perfection, the general possibility of improving the quality of the human life is in improving the existing organizations – artificial, natural,c ombined and also in creation of the new more developed organizations.

4. Regarding a society as a thing, what kind of thing must we call it?

5. Depending on specificity of soluble social problems in societies, we should consider all these questions.

6. The true answer to the threat of bureaucracy as a source of abuse of power is to create spheres of arbitrary freedom protected by unbreakable rules.

7. The passing of market-economy can become the beginning of an era of unprecedented freedom.

8. If regulation is the only means of spreading and strengthening freedom in a complex society, and yet to make use of this means is contrary to freedom per se, then such a society cannot be free.

9. To quote once more Robert Owen's inspired words: "Should any causes of evil be irremovable by the new powers which men are about to acquire, they will know that they are necessary and unavoidable evils; and childish, unavailing complaints will cease to be made.”

10. It would then seem useless to discuss the third thesis of the system.

11. Thinking consists in arranging our ideas, and consequently -in classifying them.

12. To think of fire, for example, is to put it into a certain category of things, in such a way as to be able to say that it is this or that, or this and not that.

13. Now in order to maintain itself, society frequently finds it necessary that we should see things from a certain angle and feel them in a certain way;

14. It is a similar reason which explains his tendency to treat his playthings as if they were living beings.

15. Let us therefore leave these doubtful analogies to one side.

16. Going beyond the mere letter of the totemic beliefs, Smith set himself to find the fundamental principles upon which they depend.

17. Having well mastered the language spoken by these peoples, Strehlow has been able to bring us a large number of totemic myths and religious songs, which are given us, for the most part, in the original text.

18. This newer theory of power is an attempt to develop a set of concepts which will overcome what he sees as important detects in me “traditional” notion.

19. But it is interpreted exclusively as a facility for getting what one group, the holders of power, wants by preventing another group, the 'cuts' from getting what it wants.

20. The other ways of obtaining compliance should not be regarded, Parsons stresses, as forms of power.

21. Ego may try to control the “situation” in which alter is placed, or try to control alter's “intentions”; the “modes” of control depend upon whether sanctions which may be applied are positive.

22. However, to regard the use of force in itself as a criterion of power is an error which only the more naive of social analysts would make.

23. With no hope of continuing his education or of finding employment, Sorokin resolved in the fall of 1907 to make his way to St. Petersburg.

24. To take labor out of the market means a transformation as radical as was the establishment of a competitive labor market.

UNIT 6

READING AND SPEAKING

Pre-reading task

1. Give your arguments for or against the statement: “Scientists achieve success when they come down from the heights of science to the level of an ordinary man.”

2. Are you aware of the latest achievements in your field of science? What are they?

3. What is the reason for suggesting hypotheses before any scientific research?

4. What sociological orientations do you know?

5. Read the text.

General sociological orientations

Much of what is described in textbooks as sociological theory con­sists of general orientations toward substantive materials. Such orientations involve broad postulates which indicate types of variables which are somehow to be taken into account rather than specifying determinate relationships between particular variables. Indispensable though these orientations are, they provide only the broadest framework for em­pirical inquiry. This is the case with Durkheim's generic hypothesis, which holds that the "determining cause of a social fact should be sought among the social facts preceding it" and identifies the "social" factor as institutional norms toward which behavior is oriented. Or, again, it is said that "to a certain approximation it is useful to regard society as an integrated system of mutually interrelated and functionally interdepend­ent parts." So, too, the importance of the "humanistic coefficient" in cultural data as expounded by Znaniecki and Sorokin, among others, belongs to this category. Such general orientations may be paraphrased as saying in effect that the investigator ignores this order of fact at his peril. They do not set forth specific hypotheses.

The chief function of these orientations is to provide a general con­text for inquiry; they facilitate the process of arriving at determinate hypotheses. To take a case in point: Malinowski was led to re-examine the Freudian notion of the Oedipus complex on the basis of a general sociological orientation, which viewed sentiment formation as patterned by social structure. This generic view clearly underlay his exploration of a specific "psychological" complex in its relation to a system of status relationships in a society differing in structure from that of western Europe.

The specific hypotheses which he utilized in this inquiry were all congruent with the generic orientation but were not prescribed by it. Otherwise put, the general orientation indicated the relevance of some structural variables, but there still remained the task of ferreting out the particular variables to be included.

Though such general theoretic outlooks have a more inclusive and profound effect on the development of scientific inquiry than do specific hypotheses—they constitute the matrix from which, in the words of Maurice Arthus, "new hypotheses follow one another in breathless suc­cession and a harvest of facts follow closely the blossoming of these hypotheses"—though this is the case, they constitute only the point of departure for the theorist. It is his task to develop specific, interrelated hypotheses by reformulating empirical generalizations in the light of these generic orientations.

It should be noted, furthermore, that the growing contributions of sociological theory to its sister-disciplines are more in the realm of gen­eral sociological orientations than in that of specific confirmed hypotheses.

The development of social history, of institutional economics, and the importation of sociological perspectives into psychoanalytic theory in­volve recognition of the sociological dimensions of the data rather than incorporation of specific confirmed theories. Social scientists have been led to detect sociological gaps in the application of their theory to con­crete social behavior. They do not so often exhibit sociological naiveté in their interpretations. 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. But this receptivity to a sociological outlook is often dissipated by the paucity of adequately tested specific theories of, say, the determinants of human wants or of the social processes involved in the distribution and exercise of social power. Pressures deriving from the respective theoretic gaps of the several social sciences may serve, in time, to bring about an increasing formulation of specific and systematic sociological theories appropriate to the problems implied by these gaps. General orientations do not suffice.

Answer the following questions

1. What do general sociological orientations involve?

2. How does Durkheim identify the “social factor”?

3. What is the main function of the general orientations?

4. Speak about the role of the general theoretic outlooks in the scientific inquiry.

5. Comment on the following statement from the text: “Social scientists have been led to detect sociological gaps in the application of their theory to con­crete social behavior.”

READING AND TRANSLATION

1. Read the text about Karl Marx and answer the following questions:

1. What is his approach to history and politics?

2. What kind of the society did Marx predict to come?

3. What brings disorder into the bourgeois society, in his mind?

4. What did he think of the capitalism and communism?

Karl Marx

(May 5, 1818–March 14, 1883)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, communist and revolutionary credited as the founder of communism.

Marx summarized his approach to history and politics in the opening line of the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto (1848): “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Marx argued that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, will produce internal tensions which will lead to its destruction. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, socialism will in its turn replace capitalism and lead to a stateless, classless society called pure communism which will emerge after a transitional period, the "dictatorship of the proletariat".

See, for example, Marx's comments in section one of The Communist Manifesto on feudalism, capitalism, and the role internal social contradictions play in the historical process: "We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged...the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on before our own eyes.... The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property."

On the one hand, Marx argued for a systemic understanding of socio-economic change. He argued that the structural contradictions within capitalism necessitate its end, giving way to communism:

“	“The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” (The Communist Manifesto)	”

On the other hand, Marx argued that socio-economic change occurred through organized revolutionary action. He argued that capitalism will end through the organized actions of an international working class, led by a Communist Party: "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence." (The German Ideology)

While Marx remained a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas began to exert a major influence on workers' movements shortly after his death. This influence gained added impetus with the victory of the Marxist Bolsheviks in the Russian October Revolution in 1917, and few parts of the world remained significantly untouched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century.

2. Translate the names of Karl Marx’s works:

The Communist Manifesto; The German Ideology.

3. Translate the following words and phrases:

credited as; hitherto existing society; pure communism; a transitional period; fetters; to be burst asunder; sway of the bourgeois class; appropriate products; grave-diggers; inevitable; abolish; a relatively obscure figure; impetus.

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