The Centrality of Sociality

Responses to Michael E. Brown's The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Social Sciences and the Humanities

Jeffrey A. Halley, Harry F. Dahms

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781802623635
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What do we mean by the word "social?" In The Centrality of Sociality, scholars respond to themes of The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Social Sciences and Humanities in dialogue with Michael E. Brown.

The Centrality of Sociality provides analyses of important distinctions between individual and society, agency-dependent and agency-independent objectivity, subject and object, theory and theorizing, and action and "course of activity." Apart from its theoretical interest, the book raises questions about the compelling idea that "the individual is the ultimate referent of moral discourse, " formulating the question "what is human about human affairs" in such a way that the difficulties involved in defining the word individual appear to place in jeopardy the idea of the individual. The chapters analyze themes such as the conceptualization of the social vis-a-vis the individual, theories of action, and notions of subject-object relations.

A thought-provoking collection of research, this edited volume is key reading for scholars and researchers in sociology.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Editor
• Editorial Advisory Board
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What Is Distinctively Human About Human Affairs?
• Consciousness and Crisis Today: Durkheim, Marx, Spinoza and Revolutionary vs. Reactionary Spirit
• The Uncertainties of the Social
• Brown on Sociality and the Social
• Brown’s “Course of Activity”: Non-Repeatability, the Avant-Garde, and Temporality
• The Concept of Sociality in the Literary Criticism of Georg Lukács, Lucien Goldmann, and Theodor W. Adorno
• In Defense of “the Social”: Convergences and Divergences Between the Humanities and Social Sciences in the United States
• The Ontology of the Social as a Theory of Social Forms
• Other Voices: The Concept of Heteroglossia in Michael Brown’s Concept of the Social
• Conceptual Implications in Social Sciences for Inquiring into the Social. Insights from Michael E. Brown’s The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Social Sciences and Humanities
• Theorizing, Bounded Rationality, and Expertise: Cognitive Sociology and the Quasi-Realism of Problem-Solving as a Course of Activity
• Response: What Is Distinctively Human About Human Affairs: Sociality and the Question of Society
• Index