• 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)

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.