Humanist Realism for Sociologists

✍ Scribed by Terrence Leahy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 255
• Series: Routledge Advances in Sociology, 203
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Recent critiques treat humanism as a mistaken value framework. Indeed, the concept of human nature is in fact essential for sociology, but is often being denied at the same time as it appears without acknowledgement. While classic authors can show us how to connect an ethics with a concept of human nature, current humanists must tackle the sociobiological view of human nature and interrogate humanism in the light of the ecological crisis. Humanist Realism for Sociologistsboth explains and explores some of the main arguments surrounding humanism put forward by classic social theorists such as Aristotle, Marx and Weber, as well as more contemporary authors, such as Braidotti, Oakley, Weedon, Firestone, Connell, Flyvjberg, Foucault and Bourdieu. A must-have tool for understanding how value perspectives cannot be eliminated from the social sciences, this book is essential for undergraduates, postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers interested in the fields of sociology, anthropology, women's studies, social work, human geography, political philosophy and ecology.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Preface: Basic stuff – meta-theory for the social sciences
Returning to meta-theory
Is there a crisis in the social sciences?
A crisis of the Left?
Resisting meta-theory
Bad meta-theory is always recommending the impossible
Intended topics of the book
My background in philosophy
Connell’s critique of metropolitan theory
Reading this book
1 Humanism and its critics
Humanism as ethics
The post-humanist critique
Humanism as a particular view of ‘the human’
Humanism as a ‘universalistic’ ethics
Humanism as an anthropocentric ethics
Bringing back the body
Social variability and the centrality of culture
How humans become social by transcending biology
The structure/agency dilemma
Dealing with racists and evolutionary psychologists
Human nature by the back door
The elephant in the room
2 Knowledge in the social sciences
The philosophy of perception
Sociology and epistemology
The political problems of realism
Direct realism and social science
3 Debates about epistemology in recent social science
Goldfarb on facts and interpretations
Social and natural sciences in Flyvbjerg
Weedon’s feminist poststructuralism
How Foucault handles these issues
Critical Realism and epistemology
4 Explanation in the social sciences
Social versus natural sciences
Elements of explanation in the social sciences
The poststructuralist challenge to ‘humanist’ social sciences
Discourses and subjects
Determinist and agentic versions of poststructuralism
The multiplicity of the subject?
Discourses and ideologies
Gender discourses and hegemonic masculinities
Overlaps and mapping
5 What do social scientists do in their accounts?
Weber’s ‘Protestant ethic’
Pusey’s ‘Middle Australia’
Weedon’s ‘poststructuralist feminism’
Explanations in the social sciences
6 Values, ethics and the social sciences
Weber on values and the social sciences
Weber’s second argument on values
Humanist ethics in our culture today
Weber’s influence today – an example
Social science and ethics in practice
Summarizing genre conventions
Flyvbjerg’s view
Weberian and humanist ethics
7 Two examples of humanist ethics
Aristotle
Marx
The relevance of this view of ethics
8 Ethics for social scientists today
How does Marx’s theory look now?
Aggression and human nature
Two responses from social theory
Deep Ecology and humanist environmentalism
Overview
9 Inequality, exploitation and gender
Inequality – a humanist interpretation
How women ‘choose’ their role
Second-wave understandings of inequality
The housewife role as exploitation
What is the site of household exploitation?
A cross-cultural feminist analysis?
The Munduruçu as a patriarchal society
The puzzle of patriarchy
Understanding inequality – a humanist account
10 Social class
Weber’s account of class and status
Marx’s theory of class
The hidden humanism of the Marxist account
Problems with Mandel’s version
The humanist collapse of key terms
In summary
The invention and persistence of social class
The global class system today
As mediated exploitation
Racism, conquest and sexuality
11 Bourdieu and humanist realism
Relations and substances
Agents and social space
Social reproduction and practice
Different social spaces, changes in social space
Social action in a stable social space
Habitus and consciousness
The cultural arbitrary, interest and illusio
Bourdieu as a class theorist
Final words
References
Index