Theoretical Reflections

Since the fall of totalitarian regimes after World War II and the Cold War, mainstream sociologists have fundamentally assumed that the political system of democracy is the only desirable political model to facilitate decision-making in both advanced capitalist countries and developing countries in what used to be referred to as the Third World. Yet this…

So let’s switch off all the lights and light up all the Luckies, Crankin’ up the afterglow Cause we’re goin’ out of business, everything must go. –Walter Becker and Donald Fagen   Disciplinary disputes in political science, have often implicitly and explicitly involved questions about the nature of social science knowledge. Despite this they have…

Between science and art there is no longer a gulf, and one may pass from one to the other without any break in continuity. – Durkheim If, as it has been said, photography is always real but never true, literature is always, if conversely unreal, nevertheless true.[i] I find it curious that sociology would forsake…

This cited anecdote is a commonplace phenomenon in capitalist society. No one would dare say the waitress is mistaken in referring to the customer as his[1] order, but no one should dare say that for all of history customers have always been identified as their orders. Marxists have long identified seeing human-beings as things (e.g.,…