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Index
Cover
Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Editors’ Foreword
Lecture 1 Philosophy and sociology as scientific disciplines • Reflection and theory • Tasks of the lecture • Provisional conception of a theory of society • The crisis of theoretical thought; positivism • Weber’s relationship to theory • Weber’s concept of ‘understanding’ • Weber’s concept of ‘rationality’ • Bureaucracy and domination • Dialectics; theoretical aspects of atheoretical thinking
Notes
Lecture 2 Facts and theory • Concretion and overcoming of the factual • Critique of the classificatory logic of positivism • The relationship between natural sciences and social sciences, nature and society • The anti-theoretical character of sociology • Hypothesis formulation and insight • The necessity of reflection; Darmstadt community studies • Theory formation presupposes a consideration of discontinuity; the status of facts within the complexion of society as a whole
Notes
Lecture 3 Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler; Registering facts and productive imagination • The concept of tendency • Capitalist calculus • The exchange relationship • Tendency and prophecy; the new as the core of theory • The non-identical in theory • Theory and dynamics of society • Tendency and totality • Social reality and theory
Notes
Lecture 4 Tendency and trend • Dependence of theory on its object; Distrust towards theory formation • Theory as a unified system of society; liberalism, Marxism, German Idealism • System as tendency • Modifications of ‘market society’ as results of class struggles • Monopolizing tendency of capital; state interventionism as a crisis outlet • Integration of the proletariat
Notes
Lecture 5 Announcement of a lecture by Lucien Goldmann on ‘Marxism and contemporary society’ • Problems of theory formation; ‘Work Climate’ study • The system-immanence of the proletariat • Class consciousness and integration • Ideology and experience: the phenomenon of personalization • Insight into society in theoretical thought • System-immanent consciousness • Politics as an aspect of ideology • The meaning of changes in reality and consciousness; concretism
Notes
Lecture 6 The difficulty of theory formation • Concretism as an expression of powerlessness; ‘levelled middle-class society’ • Exchange value as a source of pleasure • The meaning of concretism for labour organizations • The transformation of Marxian theory into state religion • Abstractism • Accusation of the bourgeoisification of the proletariat • Everyday class struggle
Notes
Lecture 7 Everyday class struggle • The politics of small steps • The dual character of the workers’ realism; the consequences of mechanization • The dominance of conditions • Wage satisfaction • Subjectivism in sociological research • Communication research; the semblance of freedom in the exchange principle • Subjective experiences of the semblance of levelling • Supply and demand of labour
Notes
Lecture 8 The thin crust of integrated society • Nuanced thinking • The shift of social pressure • Changes in nominalism and epistemology • Improvements within the work process • Loss of unambiguity; social theory between dogmatic ossification and naïve faith in facts • Semblance of integration and increasing socialization • Disintegration; rationalization and the reality principle • The function of the system; antagonism of power and powerlessness: disintegration through growing integration • Integration and powerlessness • False identity of the general and the particular
Notes
Lecture 9 The relationship between economy and power • The negative unity of society in general unfreedom • The culture industry and analysis of ideologies • Positivism as a manifestation of ideology • The concept of the ‘human being’ and the ‘jargon of authenticity’; ideology critique and language critique • The mythologization of antagonisms in socialist countries • The dialectic and rupture of theory and experience • Loss of experience • Theory as system and non-system; the irrationality and rationality of society; Weber’s theory of science
Notes
Lecture 10 Contradictory object and contradiction-free theory; rationality and irrationality • Changes in the concept of reason • The whole, in its rationality, is irrational • Dialectical theory • Critique of undialectical thought • Critique of unified sociology and the fetishization of science • The historical change in the function of science; openness as a key concept • Functional change in the concept of science: Leibniz, Fichte, Hegel, Kant • The equation of science with truth • The danger of intuitionism; the relationship between method and matter • Announcement of the next topic: critique of Parsons’s methodology
Notes
Lecture 11 Critique of the ideal of the scientific method • Descartes; the postulation of method and the structure of the matter • Parsons’s unified conceptual system • The relationship between psychology and sociology: Karen Horney, Erich Fromm • Freud: sociology as applied psychology; the concept of role • Critique of the psychological reduction of social processes: Marx, Durkheim • Subject and socialization in Weber’s ‘understanding’ sociology • The antagonistic relationship between the individual and society • The necessity of a critical reflection on method
Notes
Lecture 12 Fetishization of methodology instead of insight into the matter • Method I: spontaneity of thought • Formal and transcendental logic in Kant; the character of reason • Method II: dialectical philosophy and self-determination • Didactics; the complexity of capitalism and the Marxian method • Marx’s toying with dialectics • The disastrous consequence of the primacy of method • Two meanings of the concept of method
Notes
Lecture 13 The dispute between positivist and critical thinking • Scientific fetishism and the acquisition of naïveté • Perfectionism of method and irrelevance of results • Weber: material and spirit collecting • Instrumentalization of reason • The defamation of spirit • Self-examination of thought in the material • Causes of scientific fetishism • Ego weakness as a subjective reason for scientific fetishism • On the ‘fear of freedom’; the employee mentality • Theory and system
Notes
Lecture 14 The ideal of system in rationalism: reduction of the many to the one • Critique of systems that proceed from the subject: Hegel, Erdmann; Spinoza and Leibniz • The empiricist critique of rationalism • System frenzy and the disintegrated cosmos • The problem of the concept of system in Kant’s idealism • Nietzsche and Kierkegaard; rejection of system • On dogmatic attitudes • Systems regress to modes of representation • Systematic thinking and the administered world; equation of theory and system in Parsons • Focus on the essence
Notes
Lecture 15 Inspiration and spontaneity • The reified consciousness • Kant: the worldly and scholastic concepts of philosophy; unregulated experience • Empiricism as a corrective • The relationship between knowledge and democracy; experimental situations • Realism and power relations; objectivity and subjectivity
Notes
Lecture 16 Elements of a theory of society • ‘Transcendental reflection’ • The classes and the production process • The irrationality of the whole and particular rationality in the administered world • The armament apparatus • Class character and unfreedom • ‘Pluralism’ as a phenomenon of concealment • Changes in the sphere of competition and consumption • The intertwinement of rationality and irrationality in the processes of concentration and disintegration
Notes
Lecture 17 Rationality and irrationality • Power relations and control over production; bureaucracy and domination; sociological concept formation • Personalized epiphenomena and fascism • The independence of bureaucracy in Russia • Armaments and overall social structure • The position of ideology today: de-ideologization; the consumer world • The ‘consciousness industry’: the change in ideology and its contemporary production • The technological veil • Language critique and reified consciousness • Critique
Notes
Index
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