---

• Robbie McClintock, Instructor
  • Office hours @ 2nd floor, Gottesman Library
    Thursdays 4:00 to 6:00 pm and by appointment
    
• Frank Moretti, Instructor
  • Office hours @ 603 Lewisohn Hall, by appointment
    (Call Teresa Gonzales, 212 854 1962, or email her teresa@columbia.edu)

---

Please note:

     This syllabus continuously undergoes revisions, substantive and cosmetic.  The Fall semester is complete, excepting minor additional tweaks.  The Spring semester changes will be completed in the near future.  In the meantime, the syllabus for 2008/2009 will indicate the sorts of readings we will be discussing during the second half of the course.

---

     Readings in Communication theory and social thought is a year-long historical engagement with 20th-century thinking about communication and social life and its import for education.  Each week, we will sample the work of a key 20th-century social thinker and discuss his or her understanding of education, communication, and culture.  We call it "Readings in . . ." because each week course participants will engage a different, open-ended corpus of challenging reflection and theory.  Participants should prepare through readings, at once extensive but limited, to discuss, as peers of the authors and instructors, the value and significance of the full body of thought in question.  Hence, our readings are soundings into extensive material that is rich in substance, and engagement with it can be a powerful formative experience. 

     To your right, the Schedule of Meetings links to pages about the readings and discussion materials for each week.  In addition to substantial preparation for class discussions, participants should expect to contribute regularly to the course wiki, which we regard as an extension of the classroom discussion forum.  We will explain how all this works in the first class, Wednesday, September 2nd.  For each week, we list various types of readings — Context  •  Context/Text  •  Text  •  AfterText  •  Supplementary  •  General Background.  The essential reading for each week is the Text.  You should regularly try to prepare that with some care.  The Context, and its variant Context/Text should prove useful in providing context that helps make sense of the main Text — make as much use of it as you can given the constraints on your time.  Likewise, the AfterText should help in developing a sense of the interrelationships between the figures we are reading.  General Background may at times, especially early in the course, serve as a review or overall orientation — again, use it as suits your needs, interests, and constraints.  And finally, Supplementary materials simply point towards the infinite regress of further study that a commitment to an examined life draws one into.  Whether that is a direction for you — 'Go West, young man!' — is a matter for you to decide.

Preliminary reflections on the course and our readings.

     Life throws us into an encompassing communicative ethos.  Teachers, academics, artists, journalists, bloggers, public leaders, intellectuals, family and friends — all of us, educators all — aggregate our activities into a formative ethos, which feeds back upon our efforts, powerfully conditioning them.  This formative ethos, itself massively moving, ever interacting with emergent events, filled with cross-currents and eddies, works on each person in unique, determinate ways, setting limits on our potentialities, defining a complex ecology of feasible actions.  As participants in this formative ethos, we struggle to build up our capacity to understand and anticipate the changing character of it; we seek to grasp how it affects historical action, personal and public; we hope perhaps even to shape it by an increment towards what we deem to be the better, or away from what we fear to be the worst. 

     As participants in the formative ethos, we seek to anticipate what knowledge, skills, and values will prove to be of most worth, both for us and others, as the influence of events, foreseen and unforeseen, reverberates through the formative ethos of our time.  We can strengthen our capacity for such anticipation by generating theories about communication and by thinking about the social character of our circumstances.  We can develop our capacities to understand our selves in interaction with our circumstances by attending to the efforts our predecessors made to diagnose the challenge of self-determination within the encompassing formative ethos that they faced.  In this course, we study examples of such efforts in twentieth-century Western experience. 

     A basic question drives our inquiry.  How does education — understood as an historical component of all human experience, salient in the lives of every person and in the fate of every group — shape human interaction and condition the quality of life?  This basic question poses the great pedagogical problem, which is prior to all professional educative efforts.  To come to grips with it, we need to look, not at the norms and actualities of formal education, but at efforts to explain and interpret the ways in which humans give themselves determinate character and capacities in the course of their historical interactions.  20th-century communication theory and social thought is a rich arena for such inquiry and we can strengthen our capacities for it by contending with the ideas about communication and social action developed by leading thinkers since the late 19th century. 

     We should approach our readings as the work of peers, thinking.  In doing so, we will find them engaged primarily in concept formation, — Begriffsbildung in German, the fashioning of ideas with which to grasp the structure and meaning of human experience.  Concepts, formed to shape understanding and to define value, become formative in their turn, allowing people to try to draw new potentialities from the flux of their experience.  In reading through our agenda of weekly works, we have the task of developing a clear and thoughtful inventory of the key concepts each writer worked to form as he or she struggled to understand complex, ever-changing circumstances.  As a tangible outcome of our work, we should develop conceptual glossaries for each writer that we read as collaborative contributions about each on StudyPlace.

     Each week, we will concentrate on the work of a distinctive thinker, one who merits sustained, close reading.  That is something we can only approximate, trying to do the best we can under serious constraints — too many distractions, too little time, insufficient background.  The course is open to anyone interested in its agenda of inquiry, regardless of prior background or professional intent.  We do not put prerequisites on it and we seek participants from diverse specializations, but we do caution that engagement in the course requires committing substantial effort to it week by week.  For each week, we will have both a contextual and a textual reading.  The former gives useful background to draw on in interpreting the latter, the key resource with which we aim to come to grips.  In class meetings, we should seek primarily to engage through conversation directly with the text in question, seeking to ground what we have to say by reference to particular words and passages in the text we have in common.  The text, our textual reading, not the contextual, needs to provide the criteria for the quality of our understanding, the recognition that after puzzlement indeed the text makes sense to us.

     Participants should not take as the prime objective absorbing a body of established knowledge about some historical synthesis of social thought in the 20th century.  We aim to engage in communication theory and social thought, not simply to know about it.  An appreciation of common themes and concerns should emerge, unique for each participant, but we should not try to read each text as an example of some given context, ticking off which themes and concerns in the context the work reflected, as if the purpose animating it had merely been to illustrate some pre-existent givens.  The contextual readings will have value, not as authoritative summaries of what we should think, but as resources that we can draw on in developing our own understandings of the primary texts in question.  We strengthen our capacities to construe the context of our lives by seeking to appreciate through the close reading of substantial works how prior authors construed the contexts of their lives. 

     In addition, we should not presume that our selection of texts merits attention because it forms an authoritative canon, an optimal foundation for sound theorizing about communications and society in the present.  We select thinkers whose work achieved a challenging intellectual richness, forming concepts that were both deep and broad in relevance to historical experience.  The texts on our list offer us much grist for thought without burdening them with the claim that they are exhaustive or representative.  Proving such claims detracts from the real work of theory and thought.  Instead, we advance that work by building our own capacity to form powerful concepts, to engage in Begriffsbildung, by exercising our capacity to engage such work by others.  We simply want to ask what sort of conceptual resources we find in each text, taking it as an autonomous work that we seek to experience in its integrity, as best we can under the constraints.  We, merely human, need to contend with the work as peers of it, for it is the fruit of the merely human.  What can we learn from the work?  What can we do with the concepts formed in it and conveys through it?  Do these help us make sense of our experience of our world?  What do we find surprising in them?  Disturbing?  Confusing?  Inspiring? 

     As the texts we read are not authoritative, our reading of them must be tentative and initial.  One week permits an encounter all-too-brief.  But there is value to pursuing a breadth of reflective experience.  An expansive intellect samples many works and much experience, returning recurrently with sustained attention to a chosen few of them.  Those constitute a working canon for each of us, deriving its authority from each of us for each of us.  Here we should work more quickly, seriously sampling possibilities.  For what purpose would I include this work and others by this writer among those to which I think in future I might return?  Of what potentials in my own educational and intellectual options do I find this work exemplary?  What cautionary tales may it offer?  To what degree does the work and the concepts it offers support my interior discourse about the meaning of my world and my potential for action within it?  All these are among the many questions before us.

Here are some College-wide course notices.

Teachers College students have the responsibility for activating the Columbia University Network ID (UNI), which includes a free Columbia email account. As official communications from the College – e.g., information on graduation, announcements of closing due to severe storm, flu epidemic, transportation disruption, etc. -- will be sent to the student’s Columbia email account, students are responsible for either reading email there, or, for utilizing the mail forwarding option to forward mail from their Columbia account to an email address which they will monitor.

The grade of Incomplete is to be assigned only when the course attendance requirement has been met but, for reasons satisfactory to the instructor, the granting of a final grade has been postponed because certain course assignments are outstanding.  If the outstanding assignments are completed within one calendar year from the date of the close of term in which the grade of Incomplete was received and a final grade submitted, the final grade will be recorded on the permanent transcript, replacing the grade of Incomplete, with a transcript notation indicating the date that the grade of Incomplete was replaced by a final grade.

If the outstanding work is not completed within one calendar year from the date of the close of term in which the grade of Incomplete was received, the grade will remain as a permanent Incomplete on the transcript.  In such instances, if the course is a required course or part of an approved program of study, students will be required to re-enroll in the course including repayment of all tuition and fee charges for the new registration and satisfactorily complete all course requirements.  If the required course is not offered in subsequent terms, the student should speak with the faculty advisor or Program Coordinator about their options for fulfilling the degree requirement.  Doctoral students with six or more credits with grades of Incomplete included on their program of study will not be allowed to sit for the certification exam.

The College will make reasonable accommodations for persons with documented disabilities. Students are encouraged to contact the office of Access and Services for Individuals with Disabilities for information about registration (166 Thorndike Hall). Services are available only to students who are registered and submit appropriate documentation.

Meeting 1  •  September 2 — The challenge of communication theory and social thought

Our initial meeting has two introductory objectives: first, to introduce the agenda of readings we will seek to understand week by week throught the fall and spring semesters, and second, to begin to become acquainted with one another, for we will be pursuing our interpretive agenda in interaction each other. The following two essays can help clarify the interpretative challenge we face in this course of readings. Both discuss the purpose and value of social theory in the contemporary world. We aim to participate in the work of social theory as peers, selectively appropriating, as best we can, the achievements of significant predecessors in that effort.

• Delanty, Gerard. "The Foundations of Social Theory" The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. Bryan S. Turner, ed. (Blackwell Publishing, 2009). Blackwell Reference Online.
• Burawoy, Michael. "2004 ASA Presidential Address: For Public Sociology." American Sociological Review, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Feb., 2005), pp. 4-28. JSTOR.

Meeting 2  •  September 9 — Karl Marx (1818-1883) & Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)

Much of our reading will draw on and contend with the concerns and ideas of Marx and Engels, a large and complicated body of work. It is a useful warm-up to accomplish two things this week: first to get a sense of the scope and animating questions of their intellectual enterprise and second to engage a bet with Marx, thinking, using a brief, early text in which he was working out his understanding of what was happening to the human experience of work under the conditions of life emerging in the nineteenth century.

• Antonio, Robert J. "Karl Marx." The Blackwell Companion to Major Classical Social Theorists. George Ritzer, ed. (Blackwell Publishing, 2003). Blackwell Reference Online.

• Marx, Karl. "Estranged Labour." Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Karl Marx. www.marxists.org/archive/

• Marx, Karl. "Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article. Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood." Articles by Marx and Engels in the Rheinisches Zeitung (1842-3). www.marxists.org/archive/
  • Consider these articles as documents giving some insight into significant formative experiences for Marx as he took part in efforts by the press to gain the right to cover legislative debates and as he closely observed how changing economic interests drove the transformation of legal prerogatives, expropriating some and empowering others.
• Carver, Terrell. The Cambridge Companion to Marx. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Cambridge Collections Online.

• Thomson, David. "Social and political thought." Chapter IV, Material Progress and World-wide Problems 1870–1898. Ed. F. H. Hinsley. The New Cambridge Modern History. Vol. 11, Cambridge University Press, 1962. Cambridge Histories Online.

Meeting 3  •  September 16 — Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

See The Durkheim Pages for the pre-eminent online resource for the study of Durkheim.

• Jones, Robert Alun. "Émile Durkheim." The Blackwell Companion to Major Classical Social Theorists. George Ritzer, ed. (Blackwell Publishing, 2003). Blackwell Reference Online.

• Emile Durkheim. The Rules of Sociological Method (1895). W. D. Halls, trans., New York: The Free Press, 1982. Chapters I and II, pp. 50-84. Electronic Reserve. $17.95.

• Alexander, Jeffrey C. and Philip Smith. The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Cambridge Collections Online.

• Thomson, David. "The transformation of social life" Chapter II. The Shifting Balance of World Forces 1898–1945. Ed. C.L. Mowat. The New Cambridge Modern History. Vol. 12, Cambridge University Press, 1968. Cambridge Histories Online.
• Lukes, Steven. Emile Durkheim, His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985). An excellent biography.

Meeting 4  •  September 23 — Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936)

• Mitzman, Arthur. "Ferdinand Tönnies." Sociology and Estrangement: Three Sociologists of Imperial Germany. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973) esp. pp. 39-49 and 63-101. Electronic Reserve. You may find other parts of Mitzman's study interesting, especially pp. 108-112, comparing Tönnies and Durkheim.
• "The World of Theodor Storm" gives a good sense of the experiential world behind Tönnies's concept of Gemeinschaft.

• Tönnies, Ferdinand. "The Nature of Sociology." Ferdinand Tönnies. On Sociology: Pure, Applied, and Empirical. Cahnman and Heberle, trans. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971, pp. 87-107.  •  Electronic Reserve.
  • "Das Wesen der Soziologie" gives a clear introduction to key concepts in Tönnies's work.
• Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Civil Society (1887). Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis, trans. (New York: Cambridge University Press 2001). $25.00, especially "Book One: A General Classification of Key Ideas" pp. 15-91.  •  Electronic Reserve.
  • Here is a reading strategy for engaging the text in a relatively limited time. First read the table of contents of the whole book. Then page through the file in five minutes or so to get a sense of what is there. Skip the Preface and read the opening sub-section of "The Argument" (pp. 17-20). Then read sub-sections 1-2, 5-7, 10, 13, and 18 in "The Theory of Gemeinschaft," and sub-sections 19-23, 25, and 35-39 in "The Theory of Gesselschaft," skimming the sub-sections you skip over. It is relevant to think about similarities and differences between Tönnies and Durkheim. It is important to note that they use mechanical and organic in differing ways. It may also be helpful to be aware that Tönnies came from a prosperous peasant family in the farm area just south of Denmark. In addition to high stature among German sociologists, he was a prominent specialist on the work of Thomas Hobbes and his academic career suffered because Prussian governing authorities distrusted his sympathies for Social Democratic actions.

• "Tönnies and National Socialism: Two Documents and a Commentary," in Werner J. Cahnman, ed., Ferdinand Tönnies: A New Evaluation -- Essays and Documents (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973) pp. 284-290. Electronic Reserve.

• Wirth, Louis. "The Sociology of Ferdinand Tonnies." The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Nov., 1926), pp. 412-422.  •  JSTOR. In a concise exposition, Wirth survey's the full scope of Tönnies's work from the perspective of a leading American sociologist in the 1920s. It is useful as a counterbalance to the impression that Tönnies was a scholar of note only for his most famous book. He had a long, productive career.

Meeting 5  •  September 30 — Georg Simmel (1858-1918)

• Scaff, Lawrence A. "Georg Simmel." The Blackwell Companion to Major Classical Social Theorists. Ritzer, George, ed. (Blackwell Publishing, 20030. Blackwell Reference Online.
• Habermas, Jürgen. "Georg Simmel on Philosophy and Culture: Postscript to a Collection of Essays." Critical Inquiry, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Spring, 1996), pp. 403-414.  •  JSTOR.

• Simmel, Georg. "The Field of Sociology." Georg Simmel. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Kurt H. Wolff, trans. (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1950) pp. 3-25.  •  Electronic Reserve
  • Compare this introductory chapter from Simmel's major work on Sociology (1908) to Durkheim on the Rules of Socilogical Method and Weber on "Basic Sociological Terms."
• Simmel, Georg. "The Conflict in Modern Culture" and "On the Concept and Tragedy of Culture." Georg Simmel. The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays. K. Peter Etzkorn, trans. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968) pp. 11-46.  •  Electronic Reserve.
• Simmel, Georg. "The Metropolis and Mental Life." Georg Simmel. On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, Donald N. Levine, ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971) pp. 324-339.  •  Electronic Reserve
  • Simmel published much of his work through essays for a well-educated, general audience, a style represented in these.

• The Philosophy of Money (1900, 1907). 3rd edition. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby, trans., (New York: Routledge, 2004). Chapter 6, Section II: "The Concept of Culture," pp. 446-470.  •  Electronic Reserve  •  Barnes & Nobel: $44.95.
  • This excerpt from Simmel's important work on The Philosophy of Money gives a good sense of his more systematic thinking.

Max Weber (1864-1920)

• Kalberg, Stephen. "Max Weber." The Blackwell Companion to Major Classical Social Theorists. George Ritzer, ed. (Blackwell Publishing, 2003). Blackwell Reference Online.

• Max Weber. "Basic Sociological Terms" in Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds. (Berkeley: Univeristy of California Press, 1968), Vol. 1, pp. 3-62. Electronic Reserve
  
  • In reading Weber's discussion of basic sociological terms, let us concentrate on grasping what he means in his description of sociology as "a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences" (p. 4). What might Weber have understood by science, interpretive understanding, social action, and causal explanation? Is his concern with these and other basic concepts what you would expect or is it a bit surprising to you?
  • Economy and Society is a huge work, posthumous (although largely in a form that Weber gave it). Peruse the "Summary contents" to get a sense of what the whole covers (note that Chapter VI, Religious groups, Chapter VIII, Economy and law, and Chapter XVI, the City, are book-length components). Next I'd page through the whole chapter on basic concepts, to get a sense of its content and structure. Then I would read section 1a and 1b carefully, the first 20 pages or so. The main definitions in the subsequent sections (in regular type) are quite compact, elucidated by numbered remarks (in smaller type). I'd read the definitions and skim (not skip) the remarks in an effort to get a sense of what Weber was trying to grasp through his Begriffsbildung (concept formation), of which all this gives the distilled results. You might wonder which of his concepts were most important for Weber and you might also reflect on whether they still have significant importance for 21st-century inquiry.

• In 1919, Weber delivered two great lectures on "The Vocation of Politics" and "The Vocation of Science." Together, they confront one with a bracing meditation of the formative discipline of life.
• Weber used a variety of forms to advance his work — the feuilleton, ex post facto lecture texts, monographs, reports, communications and papers to academic societies, and the like. Even The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a compilation, in several variants, of monographic explorations. Hence, we tend to engage his work through the filter of anthologies, which collect and select. Here are five of them that have significant value — choosing the best of them will largely turn on the chooser's interests, with uncertainties modulated by the recognition that it is a rare reader who will do full justice to all that a robust anthology contains.

• H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946) New Edition, (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2009). These selections have stood as a very solid, useful presentation of Weber's thought.
• W. G. Runciman, ed. Max Weber: Selections in Translation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Runciman's uses topics of importance in social thought, circa 1980, to structure the selections, which are nevertheless reasonably comprehensive relative to Weber's corpus of work.
• Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, eds. Weber: Political Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Lassman and Speirs present Weber's political thought in its fullness and complexity.
• Sam Whimster, ed. The Essential Weber: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004). Whimster's selections cover an unusually wide range of current topics in social thought about which Weber had much to say by selecting only the most relevant material. "The essential Weber" is not necessarily what Weber may have thought was most essential, but what Whimster finds in Weber's work to be most essential for social thought at the turn of the twenty-first century.
• Stephen Kalberg, ed. Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on Modernity (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005). Kalberg construes the problem of modernity very broadly and organizes numerous, relatively brief selections from Weber's work, along with a few brief commentaries on it, in the resulting conceptual framework.

• Weber's life and work has provoked a vast secondary literature, much of it very good. It now includes two excellent, substantial biographies, and Weber's life repays study and reflection because it shows a range of forces, significant in his time, emblematic for ours, powerfully converging and interacting.

• Weber, Marianne. Max Weber: A Biography. Harry Zohn, trans. (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1988). Marianne Weber was a significant public intellectual in her own right and her biography of her husband adds to the substance of his achievements and to the luster of hers. It is an extraordinary effort by someone deeply, intimately involved with another over many years to grasp a full understanding of his struggles and accomplishments.
• Radkau, Joachim. Max Weber: A Biography. Patrick Camiller, trans. (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009). Joachim Radkau, a historian and social thinker whose range and depth of interests may best be described as Weberian, has written a biography that effectively competes with and complements that by Marianne Weber. Radkau has a thorough mastery of the sources, from the obvious to the remote, and he interprets them with a lively intelligence, turning Weber into a formative exemplar of an examined life.

Meeting 7  •  October 14 — W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963)

• Lemert, Charles. "W. E. B. Du Bois." The Blackwell Companion to Major Classical Social Theorists. George Ritzer, ed. (Blackwell Publishing, 2003).  •  Blackwell Reference Online.
  • Lemert delivers an elegant, concise introduction to Du Bois's life and work.

• Du Bois, W. E. B. Chapters IX, X, and XI ("Harvard in the Last Decades of the 19th Century," "Europe 1892-1894," and "Wilberforce") in The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. (New York: International Publishers, 1968), pp. 132-193.  •  Electronic Reserve.
  • Du Bois's recollections give valuable insight into the life world of the thinkers we study in the first parts of this course.

• Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk, "I. Of Our Spiritual Strivings," "II. Of the Dawn of Freedom," "III. Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others," and "IV. Of the Meaning of Progress" (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, [1903], 2003), pp. 7-57.  •  Electronic Reserve.

• Zamir, Shamoon. The Cambridge Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Cambridge Collections Online.

Meeting 8  •  October 21 — John Dewey (1859-1952)

• Festenstein, Matthew. "Dewey's Political Philosophy," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).  •  SEP.

The experience of mobilizing public opinion in World War I had a significant effect on the way important commentators understood the prospects for effective democratic self-governance in a complex society.  Both Walter Lippmann and John Dewey took part in the efforts to mold wartime opinion and in retrospect, both were deeply concerned about the implications of them, drawing contrasting conclusions in response.  These three readings, a short description of the efforts by George Creel, the mastermind of them, and then a powerful statement in the light of them by Lippmann, and a review of that statement by Dewey, provide insight into the background of concern on Dewey's mind as he wrote The Pulbic and Its Problems.

• George Creel. "Public Opinion in Wartime." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Vol. 78, Jul., 1918), pp. 185-194.   •   JSTOR.
• Lippman, Walter. The Phantom Public. (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1993, [1927]), pp 97-141 (these are very short pages).   •  Electronic Reserve.
• Dewey, John. "Public Opinion." The New Republic (Vol. 30, Issue 387, May 3, 1922) pp. 286-8.  •  EBSCOHost.

• Dewey, John. The Public and Its Problems (1927). (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1990) esp. pp. 110-219.   •  Electronic Reserve.   •  Barnes & Noble or other bookseller.

• Westbrook, Robert B. John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 293-318. Electronic Reserve.
• Whipple, Mark. "The Dewey-Lippmann Debate Today: Communication Distortions, Reflective Agency, and Participatory Democracy." Sociological Theory (Vol. 23, No. 2, June, 2005), pp. 156-178.  •  JSTOR.

Meeting 9  •  October 28 — George Herbert Mead (1863-1931)

• Shalin, Dmitri N. "George Herbert Mead." The Blackwell Companion to Major Classical Social Theorists. RITZER, GEORGE (ed). Blackwell Publishing, 2003.  •  Blackwell Reference Online.
• Lewis, David, Raymond McLain, Andrew Weigert. "Vital Realism and Sociology: A Metatheoretical Grounding in Mead, Ortega, and Schutz," Sociological Theory (Vol. 11, No. 1 March, 1993), pp. 72-95.  •  JSTOR.

• Mead, George H. “Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences.” International Journal of Ethics (Vol. 33, No. 3, April 1923) pp.229-247.  •  JSTOR.
• Mead, George Herbert. “The Genesis of the Self and Social Control.” International Journal of Ethics (Vol. 35, No. 3, April 1925) pp. 251-277.  •  JSTOR.

• The Mead Project. A treasure trove of resources by Mead and those relevant to him.
• Mead, George Herbert. “Scientific Method and Individual Thinker.” In Dewey, John, Harold Chapman Brown, George Herbert Mead, Boyd Henry Bode, Henry Waldgrave Stuart, James Hayden Tufts, et al. Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude. (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1917).  •  Google Books.
• Mead, George H. “The Philosophical Basis of Ethics.” International Journal of Ethics 18, no. 3 (April 1908): 311-323. JSTOR.
• Mead, George H. “National-Mindedness and International-Mindedness.” International Journal of Ethics 39, no. 4 (July 1929): 385-407. JSTOR.
• Mead, George Herbert. “The Philosophies of Royce, James, and Dewey in Their American Setting.” International Journal of Ethics 40, no. 2 (January 1930): 211-231. JSTOR.
• Mead, George H. “Cooley's Contribution to American Social Thought.” The American Journal of Sociology 35, no. 5 (March 1930): 693-706. JSTOR.

Meeting 10  •  November 4 — Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919)

• Lukacs, Georg. "Preface" and "The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg" in Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness:Studies in Marxist Dialectics Rodney Livingstone, trans., (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971) pp. xli-xlvii, 27-45.  •  Electronic Reserve.

• Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital, Agnes Schwarzschild, trans., (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951).
    •  Read Chapters I and XXXI, pp. 31-47, 446-453, closely.  •  Electronic Reserve.
    •  Read Chapters XXVI-XXIX, pp. 348-418, to get the gist of the argument.  •  Electronic Reserve.

Meeting 11  •  November 11 — Georg Lukacs (1885-1971)

.

• Bannet, Eve Tavor, "Lukács, Georg." The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman, eds. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).  •  CU Librfaries.

• Lukacs, Georg. "1967 Preface." Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness:Studies in Marxist Dialectics Rodney Livingstone, trans., (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971) pp. ix-xl.  •  Electronic Reserve.

• Lukacs, Georg. "What is Orthodox Marxism?" and "Class Consciousness." Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness:Studies in Marxist Dialectics Rodney Livingstone, trans., (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971) pp. 1-26, 46-82.  •  Electronic Reserve.

• Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, "The Scholar, the Intellectual, and the Essay: Weber, Lukács, Adorno, and Postwar Germany." The German Quarterly, (Vol. 70, No. 3, Summer, 1997), pp. 217-232.  •  JSTOR.

• Markus, Gyorgy. "Lukács." A Companion to Continental Philosophy. Critchley, Simon and William R. Schroeder, eds., (Blackwell Publishing, 1999). Blackwell Reference Online.

Meeting 12  •  November 18 — Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

• Laclau, Ernesto. "Gramsci." A Companion to Continental Philosophy. Critchley, Simon and William R. Schroeder, eds., (Blackwell Publishing, 1999).  •  Blackwell Reference Online.
• Urbinati, Nadia. "From the Periphery of Modernity: Antonio Gramsci's Theory of Subordination and Hegemony." Political Theory, (Vol. 26, No. 3 June, 1998), pp. 370-391.  •  JSTOR.

• Antonio Gramsci. The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935 (1930+/-). David Forgacs, ed., (New York: New York University Press, 2000). On Hegemony and related concepts. pp. 189-245.  •  Electronic Reserve.  •  Barnes & Noble and other booksellers. See Marxists.org for the paragraphs from the Preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which frame the problem of "structure and superstructure."

• Antonio Gramsci. The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935 (1930+/-). David Forgacs, ed., (New York: New York University Press, 2000). On Education, culture, and journalism. pp. 53-75, 300-322, and 363-402.  •  Electronic Reserve.  •  Barnes & Noble and other booksellers.

Meeting 13  •  December 2 — Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950)

• Smithies, Arthur. Joseph Alois Schumpeter, 1883-1950." The American Economic Review, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Sep., 1950), pp. 628-648. JSTOR. Smithies' Memorial gives a clear, sympathetic overview of Schumpeter's life and work.
• Kessler, Martin. "The Synthetic Vision of Joseph Schumpeter." The Review of Politics (Vol. 23, No. 3, July, 1961), pp. 334-355.  •  JSTOR.

• Schumpeter, Joseph A. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (3rd. edition, 1942, 1947, & 1950). New York: HarperCollins, 1976. Part II. Can Capitalism Survive? Chapters VII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, and XIV, pp. 81-86, 107-163.  •  Electronic Reserve.  •  $16.00.

• Elliott, John E. "Marx and Schumpeter on Capitalism's Creative Destruction: A Comparative Restatement." The Quarterly Journal of Economics (Vol. 95, No. 1, August, 1980), pp. 45-68.  •  JSTOR.

Meeting 14  •  December 9 — Karl Polanyi (1886-1964)

• Block, Fred. "Karl Polanyi and the Writing of The Great Transformation." Theory and Society (Vol. 32, No. 3, June, 2003), pp. 275-306.  •  JSTOR.

• Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944, 1957). 2nd paperback edition with a Foreword by Joseph E. Stiglitz and an Introduction by Fred Block. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). Chapters 11-21, pp. 136-268.  •  Electronic Reserve.   •  1957 edition: ACLS Humanities E-Book  •  Or purchase: Barnes & Noble and other booksellers.

• Birchfield, Vicki. "Contesting the Hegemony of Market Ideology: Gramsci's 'Good Sense' and Polanyi's 'Double Movement'." Review of International Political Economy (Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring, 1999), pp. 27-54.  •  JSTOR.

Or better, but it is long:

• Burawoy, Michael. "For a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi." Politics & Society (Vol. 31, No. 2, June, 2003), pp. 193-261.  •  SAGE Journals.

Meeting 15  •  December 16 — Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966)

• Jay, Martin. "The Extraterritorial Life of Siegfried Kracauer" in Martin Jay. Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) pp. 152-197.  •  Electronic Reserve.

• Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, Thomas Y. Levin, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), "The Mass Ornament," "Revolt of the Middle Classes," "The Group as Bearer of Ideas," and "Georg Simmel" pp. 75-86, 107-127, 143-170, and 225-257.  •  Electronic Reserve.

• Adorno, Theodor W. "The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer." New German Critique (No. 54, Special Issue on Siegfried Kracauer, Autumn, 1991), pp. 159-177.  •  JSTOR.
• Jay, Martin. "Adorno and Kracauer: Notes on a Troubled Friendship" in Martin Jay. Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) pp. 217-236.  •  Electronic Reserve.

• Hansen, Miriam. "Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer." New German Critique, (No. 56, Special Issue on Theodor W. Adorno, Spring - Summer, 1992), pp. 43-73.  •  JSTOR.

As a strategy of study in Readings in Communication Theory and Social Thought, we are respecting the intellectual integrity of individual theorists, introducing the work of each as a reflective effort worthy of our trying to understand it "from the inside," so to speak. Many scholars study the same assemblage of inquiries and ideas "from the outside," however, in a more synthetic effort to describe movements of thought and to assess their effects. Such work, forever churned by changing initial interests, can expand and inform our sense of the context relevant to understanding the work of each theorist, for unique and significant circumstances surround each effort to live an examined life. Here we list a selection of worthwhile secondary sources, far more than you might engage in this academic year, but perhaps useful should you continue to pursue the topic.

• Jeffrey Alexander, Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), situates post-War work in sociological theory against diverse currents of 20th-century thought.

• Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought (Richard Howard and Helen Weaver, trans., 2 vols., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1967, 1998), reflected on the work of separate thinkers in – Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Pareto, and Weber in this well-known study.

• Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1972), introduce complex ideas about the social construction of knowledge with brevity and clarity.

• Alex Callinicos, Social Theory: A Historical Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1999), addresses developments in 20th-century social thought from a more recent, post-Cold War perspective, unfortunately writing in a highly expository voice with too little condifence in his own role as thinker.

• _____, Making History : Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory (2nd edition, Leiden, NL: Brill Academic Publishers, 2004) Ebrary.

• Frisby, David, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986). Frisby concentrates on three figures we study and relates them to many others on our list.

• Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim, and Max Weber (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), introduces the ideas and influence of three pivotal thinkers.

• Geoffrey Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Social Theory (2nd edition, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), gives an intelligent survey of the role of social theory in the effort, which has taken place since the Enlightenment, to cope adequately with historical contingency. He writes from the vantage point of an intellectual in a Europe recovering from World War II in the midst of Cold War uncertainties.

• H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930 (1958, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), is wonderful for the clarity with which it synthesized a great diversity of developments. For an historical sense for the European background it provides the best starting point. Hughes's The Obstructed Path: French Social Thought in the Years of Desperation, 1930-1960(1968, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002) is also very illuminating, although the cast of thinkers with which it deals are less crucial to our Readings.

• Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York, Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 1976, 1996), team to give an illuminating picture of the formative influences shaping 20th-century thinkers like Wittgenstein.

• Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (1973, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), has been the standard introduction to the Frankfurt School since it first appeared. In Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, Ebrary), Jay develops a picture of social thought with great range and depth.

• Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983)is well-known for valuable synthesis about turn of the century changes in the textures of life, which have not yet fully run their course and deeply affect communication and reflection on it.

• Harry Liebersohn, Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1870-1923 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988), gives a good overview of German social thought prior to the Frankfurt School.

• Armand Mattelart, Theories of Communication: A Short Introduction (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998), touches on a great range of work, providing an informative initial survey. Translations of his more extended studies, Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture (1994) and The Invention of Communication (1996), both University of Minnesota Press, look at the historical sources and dynamics of communication theory in greater depth.

• Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1966, 1993), concentrated on the development of certain key themes in the work of social thinkers — community, authority, status, the sacred, and alienation.

• Carl Schorske, Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980), provides deep insight into the cultural context out of which 20th-century currents of social thought emerged, one of several excellent books treating Vienna at the end of the 19th century as a representative locus of intellect.

• Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (Harry Zorn, trans., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1943, 1964), wrote an engrossing reflection on his life as a European man of letters shortly before his suicide in 1942, despairing of the culture he had spent his life celebrating.

---

• Thomson, David. "The transformation of social life." The Shifting Balance of World Forces 1898–1945. Ed. C.L. Mowat. The New Cambridge Modern History. Vol. 12, Ch. 2. Cambridge University Press, 1968. Cambridge Histories Online.
• Thomson, David. "Social and political thought." Material Progress and World-wide Problems 1870–1898. Ed. F. H. Hinsley. The New Cambridge Modern History. Vol. 11, Ch. 4. Cambridge University Press, 1962. Cambridge Histories Online.
• Hookway, Christopher. "Pragmatism." The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945. Ed. Thomas Baldwin. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cambridge Histories Online.
• Adair-Toteff, Christopher. "Neo-Kantianism: the German idealism movement." The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945. Ed. Thomas Baldwin. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cambridge Histories Online.
• Callinicos, Alex. "Western marxism and ideology critique." The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945. Ch. 57. Ed. Thomas Baldwin. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cambridge Histories Online.
• Bohman, James. "The methodology of the social sciences." The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945. Ch. 55. Ed. Thomas Baldwin. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cambridge Histories Online.
• Callinicos, Alex. "Marxism and anarchism." The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945. Ch. 22. Ed. Thomas Baldwin. Cambridge University Press, 2003. http://histories.cambridge.org.monstera.cc.columbia.edu:2048/uid=1435/pdf_handler?id=chol9780521591041_CHOL9780521591041A024&pdf_hh=1 Cambridge Histories Online].
• Hawthorn, Geoffrey. "Sociology and the idea of social science." The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945. Ch. 17. Ed. Thomas Baldwin. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cambridge Histories Online.
• Anderson, R. Lanier. "The debate over the Geisteswissenschaften in German philosophy." The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945. Ch. 15. Ed. Thomas Baldwin. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cambridge Histories Online.
• Palumbo, Antonino and Alan Scott. "Weber, Durkheim and the sociology of the modern state." The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought. Eds. Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy. The Cambridge History of Political Thought. Vol. 6, Ch. 17. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cambridge Histories Online.
• Dews, Peter. "Postmodernism: pathologies of modernity from Nietzsche to the post-structuralists." The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought. Eds. Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy. The Cambridge History of Political Thought. Vol. 6, Ch. 16. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cambridge Histories Online.
• Bellamy, Richard. "The advent of the masses and the making of the modern theory of democracy." The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought. Eds. Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy. The Cambridge History of Political Thought. Vol. 6, Ch. 3. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cambridge Histories Online.
• McLellan, David. "Western Marxism." The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought. Eds. Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy. The Cambridge History of Political Thought. Vol. 6, Ch. 13. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cambridge Histories Online.
• Khilnani, Sunil. "French Marxism – existentialism to structuralism." The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought. Eds. Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy. The Cambridge History of Political Thought. Vol. 6, Ch. 14. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cambridge Histories Online.
• Revel, Jacques. "History and the Social Sciences." The Modern Social Sciences. Eds. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross. The Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 7. Ch. 21. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cambridge Histories Online.
• Bannister, Robert C. "Sociology." The Modern Social Sciences. Eds. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross. The Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 7. Ch. 18. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cambridge Histories Online.
  
  

MSTU5606/MSTU5607 Grading Policies

     Participants in MSTU5606/MSTU5607 seeking letter credit will be assigned separate grades for the fall and spring semester.  The instructors consider grades at an advanced level of graduate education to be an extrinsic part of the academic system, not an intrinsic part of the course.  At this stage, youmay learn with them, but not from them.  By that, we mean that grades are necessities possibly marginally furthering your ability to advance through the system, but they do not give you any real, substantive feedback.  For a self-directing scholar (and at this stage you should think of yourself as a self-directing scholar), substantive feedback comes from your inner accounting about the development of your understanding, about the scope of your awareness, about the state of your agenda of inquiry.  Your understanding should deepen; your awareness expand; and your agenda of inquiry become more subtle and demanding.

     Essentially, we provide grades for the system on the principle of "do no harm." They have three variants — excel (A), succeed in two flavors (A- or B+), and caution with degrees of emphasis (B, B-, or down).  We base these grades on our judgment about the quality of your participation in class discussions and in the course wiki.  To succeed, you need to have made a serious effort to prepare for class discussions by engaging the assigned readings thoughtfully, you need to contribute your questions and observations actively to class discussions, and you need to participate with some regularity and creativity in developing the course wiki.  Harm can be done in grading by failing to recognize genuinely standout achievement or failing to warn when effort, or its result, falls short of reasonable expectations.  Otherwise, the question of grades should be neutral, not intruding on the substantive process of inquiry and interpretation.

     Bottom line: The course is difficult; the grading easy.