Americans Thinking America

Elements of American Social Thought
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-138-62974-5
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 256 Seiten, Format (B × H): 178 mm x 254 mm, Gewicht: 1302 g

Reihe: A New Order of Social Things

In this dynamic book, Charles Lemert elaborates a vigorous, distinctive, and creative American tradition in social thought.

American social theory has tended to be overshadowed by European social thought. Yet, looking deeper, Americans have always made important contributions to social theory. Drawing upon the work of a dazzling array of both seminal and unjustly overlooked philosophers, sociologists, litterateurs, and political activists, Lemert constructs a coherent yet variegated intellectual framework for understanding American social theory and culture from the colonial era to the present. In doing so, Lemert analyses American intellectual attitudes on race, gender, popular culture, political thought, capitalism, and social movements, while also exploring schools of thought from transcendentalism and pragmatism to interactionism and intersectionality.

In his inimitable style, Charles Lemert, a master of "finding theory where you’d least expect it," offers a masterful rendering of the American tradition in social theory. In doing so, Lemert shines new light on social theory and American history. Both authoritative and accessible, this indispensable work will be essential reading for students, scholars, and general readers with interests in social theory and American social history.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lemert, Charles

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

PART I: Americans Thinking America 1 What is Theory? How Can There Be a Theory of America? 2 Elements of American Social Theory PART II: American Social and Natural Spaces, 1727–1861 3 The First Fires of America’s Revolutionary Culture: Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Paine 4 America’s Revolutionary Culture Burns Bright: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson 5 Nation- State in the Making: James Madison and Alexander Hamilton 6 America Faces Its Fate: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller PART III: Civil War and American Pragmatism, 1861–1917 and After 7 A Suffering Republic and its Culture: John Brown and Harriet Tubman 8 Balm for the Nation’s Wounds: Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman 9 Abraham Lincoln’s Implicit Practical Social Theory and A New America 10 Suffering as the Seed of Pragmatism: Abraham Lincoln and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 11 Pragmatism, the Hard Realities of Change: William James, Charles Saunders Pierce, John Dewey, Jane Addams, George Herbert Mead, Richard Rorty, Cornel West PART IV: American Culture Tries to Explain its Disorder, 1919–1968 12 The Function of American Culture: Henry Adams, Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton 13 Interpreting Cultures: Robert Bellah, Clifford Geertz, Alvin Gouldner, George Marcus, Michael Fischer, Jeffrey Alexander 14 Excluded Cultures: W.E.B Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Paula Gunn Allen, James Baldwin, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X 15 The Fungible Interaction Order: David Riesman, Erik Erikson, Edwin Lemert, Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel 16 Ethnographies and American Social Theory: Robert Park, W.E.B. Du Bois, W. I. Thomas, Florian Znaniecki, Elliott Liebow, Carol Stack, William Julius Wilson 17 The New Ethnographers of Urban Disorder: AbdouMaliq Simone, Elijah Anderson, Waverly Duck, Victor Rios, Matthew Desmond, Nikki Jones, Alice Goffman PART V: Reprise 18 Power, Domination, and the World Revolution of 1968: Herbert Marcuse, K

Über Autor(innen)

Charles Lemert is University Professor and John C. Andrus Professor of Social Theory Emeritus at Wesleyan University, USA. He has written extensively on social theory, globalization, and culture. He is author of Globalization: An Introduction to the End of the Known World (Routledge, 2015), Why Niebuhr Matters (Yale University Press, 2011), Structural Lie: Small Clues to Global Things (Routledge, 2008), Thinking the Unthinkable: The Riddles of Classical Social Theories (Routledge, 2007), Postmodernism is Not What You Think: Why Globalization Threatens Modernity (Routledge, 2005), and Muhammad Ali: Trickster in the Culture of Irony (Polity Press, 2003). He is also co-author of Introduction to Contemporary Social Theory (Second Edition, Routledge, 2022) and Capitalism and Its Uncertain Future (Routledge, 2021), editor of Social Theory: The Multicultural, Global, and Classic Readings (Seventh Edition, Routledge, 2021) and co-editor of Globalization: A Reader (Routledge, 2010).